I’ve talked about my concerns about the future of honey bee populations here before, but the bees are in the news again this week, with reports of 31% of colonies not surviving this past winter.
- Wired: One-Third of U.S. Honeybee Colonies Died Last Winter, Threatening Food Supply
- Time: Beepocalypse Redux: Honeybees are still dying – and we still don’t know why
- NPR: Bee Deaths May Have Reached A Crisis Point For Crops
This is bad. Really bad.
If you’re not familiar with what’s happening with honey bees, I highly recommend the links above. They’ll get you the basic idea of this problem, which is widespread (worldwide) and not getting better.
What can we do? Well, there’s not a lot of concrete knowledge, but there are a few tips floating around.
- Support organic produce – one of the big red flags for a lot of these studies is the presence of neonicotinoids, a type of pesticide that is neuroactive. It’s probably not the ONLY thing affecting the bees, but purchasing produce that doesn’t use these chemicals helps, in a small way, to reduce their heavy and widespread use.
- Keep your yard weedy – bees thrive on wild grasses and “weeds”, and a lot of farmland and yard land has done away with the native grasslands that bees need to get the nutrition they need to survive. Reducing pesticide and herbicide use in your yard not only directly helps keep bees from getting sick, it increases the variety of plants they can eat for survival. Cultural diversity in your yard may not look like a golf course, but it’s better for the environment for a ton of reasons.
- Stop using commercial pesticides – just like commercial herbicides are bad for bees, pesticides directly affect them. Move in the direction of organic garden and yard care. It might be a bit more work, but it’s better for you, for the environment, for your local waterways, AND for the bees.
- Plant a bee garden – it won’t look as manicured as a rose garden, but many varieties of plants are bee-friendly. Plant them in an area not near your walkways and home entrances (especially if someone in your house is allergic). This is a good list to start from (there are lots to choose!) if you’re not sure what kinds of plants are bee attractors. Even if you can’t devote a whole garden to your honey bee friends, planting bee-friendly plants, especially native ones, is helpful!
- Buy Local Honey – this helps keep local beekeepers in business. With so many hives dying out, apiarists are in high demand, and the more we support them, the better their chances of staying in business to help keep our food crops pollinated. If you’re not sure where to get local honey, or your grocer tends to only stock Big Name Brands that aren’t even guaranteed to be from the US, try asking at a farmer’s market or your local hardware store. I buy my honey by the quart at the hardware store, and it comes from about 20 miles from my house.
- Support Groups that Support Bees – Not everyone on that list gets a true thumbs up from an environmental perspective, but there are several research groups there that accept donations and are actively working to further honey bee research.
It all seems like a drop in the bucket – and it is. There’s not much one individual can do in the face of a worldwide bee collapse that is likely being worsened by our commercial agriculture methods. But as with so many other things, every little bit helps. It is daunting, but I feel like it’s important to try anyway.
So have some honey in your tea, and enjoy your almonds, blueberries, melons, and fresh vegetables. But don’t forget the bees that make those things possible. The bees need our help.
If I find more information on how to help fund honeybee research, I will post it as well.
Little Druid on the Prairie 
The plight of the honeybee is also something incredibly close to my heart. I was so thrilled that my province, British Columbia, now offers grants to those wanting to start an apiary and they are now allowing each home to have 1 hive in their yard. Sadly, I’m in an apartment, and cannot have a hive. I did, however, sneak a little Mason Bee home into my patio garden. They are so lovely!
The problem is convincing much of suburbia to stop putting chemicals on their lawns. I live in more-or-less a suburban area where people love to mow their lawns constantly and put chemicals on it so it looks nice. (It doesn’t help that the major city near me can fine people for letting their lawns get too tall.)
The widespread thinking regarding the suburban lawn needs to change.
Blessings,
Victoria
Yeah – the manicured front lawn thing is a big part of the problem – even more so than a lot of commercial agriculture. A lot of people who put pesticides and herbicides on their yards do so either improperly or way too frequently, and that runoff ends up in the waterways and causing all sorts of problems. We’ve gone “organic” (which also means rather lazy) with our yard, relying on hand-pulling the bad weeds and just mowing down the rest. It doesn’t look like a golf course, but I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the biodiversity anyway. Plus, with a mulching lawnmower, it’s a lot less work!
Actually my own parents hire a “lawn care” company to put the chemicals on the lawn. They come about once a week. I would assume they know the proper way to apply chemicals and such, but there’s really no way to know.
Fellow ADF Druid Sean posted some links on his Facebook page a couple days ago that describe what is really going on that you might want to check out. It looks like there is much more to it than simply the use of pesticides and herbicides.
http://membracid.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/guest-post-honey-bees-ccd-and-the-elephant-in-the-room/
Click to access ccd.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2715894/
He also says:
“There is a bunch of misinformation out there about Colony Collapse Disorder being perpetuated by the media and social media like Facebook. I’m not the total answer man, but as a beekeeper, I do understand what is happening. Also, these are just a few thoughts here on Facebook as a real article on this would be lengthy.
The cause of the collapse of commercial beehives is being blamed on nicotine based insecticides, cell phone signals, to varroa mites—though one would have to understand that insecticides do kill insects so bees would obviously be affected. In reality, it can be centered on several factors including a major virus hitting commercial beehives, the reuse of diseased hive boxes and frames, the widespread use of antibiotics, lack of a diverse diet, the movement of these hives upwards of seven times in a season, and the non-biodiversity of the Italian honeybee. The fact that commercial bees are being fed antibiotics causes them to be resistant to certain diseases–no different than humans. Add to the fact that beekeepers are simply splitting other hives and reintroducing colonies into diseased boxes does nothing to stop the spread of what the CDC has deemed a communicable disease.
CCD is not being seen with organic and non-commercial beekeepers, it is centered almost exclusively on the pollination industry. CCD is not a new phenomenon, but rather a renaming of an earlier die-off disorder called Fall Dwindle Disease—which has been recorded since 1869. A quick way to slow the kill-off of these bee colonies is to burn out the beehive boxes and frames and use brand new wax before reinstalling a new nuke into the hive. Also, beekeepers should use more aggressive bees, such as the Russian or even Africanized bees (Africanized bees are used almost exclusively in Central and South America now). It is more time consuming, but in the long run will help slow the spread of this devastating problem.”
Just some information I thought you would be interested in!
Blessings,
Victoria
Yeah, I thought I covered that it was being caused by a number of different factors – and the articles I linked all did as well, as well as stating that it’s not any one thing that’s causing the problem, but a number of different problems that are causing a sort of “perfect storm”. I know when my grandfather lost his hives, he had to burn them, so I thought that was common practice, but I suppose not all beekeepers are so conscientious.
In any case, it’s a complicated problem that we’re certainly not helping, and I’m pretty sure the above steps are all good for the environment in general, as well as helping the bees. I didn’t post any tips on how to be a better beekeper because, well, I don’t keep bees, and that information is better left explained by someone who does (like Sean). I live in a subdivision, where it’s against the neighborhood code to keep hives, and my husband is EXTREMELY allergic to bee stings, so I will probably never have bees. I figured this would be a good introduction.
If Sean would like to contribute a post here explaining the more detailed aspects, I’d love for him to do so!