Organic and Commercial Beekeeping

Organic and Commercial Beekeeping
The sudden disappearance of more than one-quarter of North America’s honeybees has brought out some strange ideas and downright myths. A couple of bee myths are big on the Internet. A small German scientific study looking at a specific type of cordless phones and the homing systems of bees exploded over the Internet and late night television shows. It quickly grew into erroneous reports blaming cell phones for the honeybee die-off, which scientists are calling Colony Collapse Disorder.
With over a quarter of the nation’s commercially raised honeybees have disappeared, befuddling scientists and stirring fears that crops could go unpollinated.
Contrary to the homespun image of rural beekeepers and cottage idylls, honeybees in the U.S. are raised on an industrial scale and used to pollinate crops in areas where monoculture planting and pesticide use have killed off indigenous pollinators.
While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops – from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons – rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. Honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, says a Cornell study. Bees help generate some $14 billion in produce.
Research is only beginning and hard data is still lacking, but beekeepers suspect everything from a new virus or parasite to pesticides and genetically modified crops. Scientists have hastily established a CCD working group at Pennsylvania State University. Last week, the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Agriculture held hearings on the missing bees.
For many entomologists, the bee crisis is a wake-up call. By relying on a single species for pollination, US agriculture has put itself in a precarious position, they say. A resilient agricultural system requires diverse pollinators. This speaks to a larger conservation issue. Some evidence indicates a decline in the estimated 4,500 potential alternate pollinators – native species of butterflies, wasps. and other bees. The blame for that sits squarely on human activity – habitat loss, pesticide use, and imported disease – but much of this could be offset by different land-use practices.
The honeybee’s disappearance is, in fact, a significant threat. It not only raises the prospect of another wildlife species going extinct, it also endangers the livelihoods of beekeepers and farmers and even the cost and availability of many foods.
Since last fall, at least a fourth of the 2.4 million bee colonies in the U.S. have gone missing, according to the Apiary Inspectors of America. Some beekeepers — especially itinerant ones who move their bees cross-country to provide pollination services — reported that what’s being called colony collapse disorder (CCD) has claimed up to 90% of their bees. And the scientists haven’t many clues about what’s killing the critters.
Crops that make up a third of the U.S. diet depend on honeybees for production. That’s $15 billion worth of fruits, vegetables and tree nuts. Roughly 11% of all U.S. crops (measured by value) require the bees to do their ancient job of aiding propagation by spreading pollen from one plant to another. And honeybees contribute to the pollination of many other crops, including major U.S. field crops soybeans, sunflowers and cotton. In California alone, about a fourth of all farm productions — $6 billion in fruits, including wine grapes, nuts, vegetables, alfalfa and other crops — rely on honeybees.
For farmers there and elsewhere, CCD spells much higher production costs. Almond growers in the Golden State, for example, for years paid beekeepers $30-$50 per hive to pollinate their almond orchards each spring. Last year, fees for the bee’s services rose to over $100, largely because hive populations had been reduced by infestations of a deadly mite. This year, with hives further devastated by CCD, the cost for desperate orchard owners climbed to between $130 and $150, says Gene Brandi, a spokesman for the Calif. State Beekeepers Assn. Some even imported colony starter kits, which have a queen and a few thousand worker bees, from Australia to do the job, he says.
Eventually, consumers will pay the price for the pollinators’ disappearance. Poor pollination will shrink yields, driving up the tab for putting fruits, vegetables and other foods on the dinner table. Already, the price of honey is pushing higher. Producers got an average of 14% more last year for the golden sweetener than they did the year before.
Unless bee experts solve the mystery and come up with a remedy soon, millions more bees will likely be wiped out next fall and winter. Making matters worse, populations of other pollinators, such as wasps and other bees have been vastly reduced by pesticide use, loss of habitat or other diseases. Wild honeybees are being ravaged by the same deadly varroa mite that beekeepers see attacking their managed hives.
What entomologists know about CCD now is fairly elementary. According to Professor Diane Cox Foster at Penn State University, it apparently involves a loss of navigation ability for bees since they leave the hive and don’t return, leaving only the queen and a few young. Additionally, high levels of bacteria and, particularly, fungi are typically found in dead bees, suggesting something is suppressing their immune systems. The leading suspects are pathogens, perhaps imported from another continent, and pesticides, including the Bacillus thuringiensis that genetically engineered corn and cotton produce themselves. But scientists are casting a wide net in their search for the cause. Even the possible effects of radio waves — from cell phones, for example — on bees’ homing ability are being checked. Their efforts are aided by the recent sequencing of the honeybee genome at Baylor University. That will allow them to quickly isolate and identify genes tied to traits that may resist CCD.
Meanwhile, beekeepers are playing defense with hive hygiene, mite control and extra feed to strengthen bees, says Daniel Weaver, president of the American Beekeeping Federation. They’re being more cautious in blending new bees with theirs and asking farmers to help by taking great care with the use of pesticides. Some pesticides can hurt queens and young bees, even though they’re safe for adult bees. Beekeepers now want anyone applying pesticides within a three-mile radius of the beehives to communicate with the bees’ managers. However, we would not be so dependent on commercial non-native factory farmed honey bees if we were not killing off native pollinators. Organic agriculture does not use chemicals or crops toxic to bees and, done properly, preserves wildlife habitat in the vicinity, recognizing the intimate relationship between cultivated fields and natural areas.
While no one is certain why honey bee colonies are collapsing, factory farmed honey bees are more susceptible to stress from environmental sources than organic or feral honey bees. There is a general misconception that beekeeping is somehow ‘natural,’ but in commercial operations the bees are treated much like livestock on factory farms.
Currently, few apiaries in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, are reporting colony collapse. The problem with commercial operations are the pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.
Bees have been bred for the past 100 years to be much larger than they would be if left to their own devices. If you find a feral honeybee colony in a tree, for example, the cells bees use for egg-laying will be about 4.9 mm wide. This is the size they want to build ­ the natural size.
The foundation wax that beekeepers buy have cells that are 5.4 mm wide so eggs laid in these cells produce much bigger bees. It’s the same factory farm mentality we’ve used to produce other livestock ­ bigger is better. But the bigger bees do not fare as well as natural-size bees.
Varroa mites, a relatively new problem in North America, will multiply and gradually weaken a colony of large bees so that it dies within a few years. Mites enter a cell containing larvae just before the cell is capped over with wax. While the cell is capped, the bee transforms into an adult and varroa mites breed and multiply while feeding on the larvae.
The larvae of natural bees spend less time in this capped over stage, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of varroa mites produced. In fact, very low levels of mites are tolerated by the bees and do not affect the health of the colony. Natural-size bees, unlike large bees, detect the presence of varroa mites in capped over cells and can be observed chewing off the wax cap and killing the mites. Colonies of natural-size bees are healthier in the absence mites, which are vectors for many diseases.

It’s now possible to buy small cell foundation from US suppliers, but most beekeepers in Canada have either never heard of small cell beekeeping, aren’t willing to put the effort into changing or are skeptical of the benefits. This alternative is not promoted at all by the Canadian Honey Council, an organization representing the beekeeping industry, which even tells its members on their website that, “The limitations to disease control mean that losses can be high for organic beekeepers.”
Organic beekeeping, as defined by certification agencies, allows the use of less toxic chemicals. It’s more an IPM approach to beekeeping than organic.
Commercial beekeeping today is just another cog in the wheel of industrial agriculture. It is becoming increasingly necessary because pesticides and habitat loss are killing native pollinators, and vast tracks of monoculture crops aren’t integrated into the natural landscape.
In an organic Canada, native pollinators would flourish and small diversified farms would keep their own natural bees for pollination and local honey sales. The factory farm aspects of beekeeping, combined with an onslaught of negative environmental factors, puts enough stress on the colonies that they are more susceptible to dying out.