|
|
|
Local beekeepers, honey sellers and produce farmers are worried about the mysterious malady known as colony collapse disorder, which kills off hives, but most of them aren’t feeling any direct negative impacts — yet.
“Not to this point, but we are concerned,” said Frank Schmidt, of Schmidt Aviaries, who sells 40,000 pounds of honey at small stores and farmers markets in the area and keeps 600 hives north and south of Colorado Springs, mostly near fields of alfalfa — when he can find them.
“The farming is getting pretty limited around here,” he said.
Urbanization is only one of many challenges bees and their keepers are facing.
Schmidt had a booth set up at a recent screening of the documentary film “The Vanishing of the Bees,” part of Cross Pollination 2011, a community-wide three-month-long celebration of the role pollinators play in American life with a special emphasis on how to protect them. It kicked off just after Aug. 20, which is National Honeybee Awareness Day.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that bee pollination contributes $15 billion annually to the nation’s crop value. Honeybees in particular are responsible for 80 percent of the nation’s crop pollination. But in the 1980s they began to decline in numbers, as non-native pests such as mites infiltrated hives, and then in 2007, with the arrival of colony collapse disorder, a term coined for mass disappearances of bees from hives throughout North America, the buzz got even louder.
“The Vanishing of the Bees” tells the story of two Florida beekeepers who blew the whistle on the rare phenomenon after they noticed that the bees seemed to grow weak and listless before abandoning their hives entirely. It explains that while bees were already routinely trucked across the country to pollinate crops, when the number of U.S. bees became too low to adequately pollinate the almond orchards in California, bees started being shipped across oceans, too.
Along with the bees, honey itself is increasingly transcontinental. Large amounts of cheap honey are being imported and blended into domestic versions, which brings prices to consumers down but makes honey production less profitable. According to a recent report in Food Safety News, at least a third of all the honey consumed in the U.S. now comes from China, much of it illegally.
Still, honey prices have been trending higher in recent years, with the average retail price above $5 a pound so far in 2011.
Though researchers haven’t reached a conclusion on what is continuing to afflict the bees, the documentary shown in Colorado Springs makes the case that “systemic pesticides” (the kind with long residuals that are absorbed deep into plant tissues) are largely to blame, a claim that has lead to clashes between beekeepers, conventional farmers and big agribusiness companies worldwide. Political demonstrations in some parts of Europe have succeeded in sparking bans of certain products.
Modern beekeeping practices also include feeding bees sugar syrups and using artificial insemination for breeding purposes, which organic beekeepers question in the film.
One reason damage from the honeybee die-off has been limited so far is that farmers and gardeners benefit from a wide range of native pollinators including wild bees, wasps and moths. Honeybees are actually native to Europe and were introduced to the U.S.
Adam Smith, part of Smith Family Farm of Rocky Ford, runs a produce stand in Falcon and said customers often ask about whether the loss of honeybees is hurting the farm.
“It seems like we’ve been hearing about it a lot the last three or four years, but we’ve never had any trouble,” he said. “We always lose some bees over the winter, but that’s normal.”
“Last year we didn’t have any honeybees to speak of,” added Doug Wiley, who also farms in the Arkansas Valley near Boone. “I was worried about the melon crop, but we had an excellent crop. That taught me that the natives can hold things up, enough to keep it from being a failure, anyway.”
Colony collapse disorder has put bees in the spotlight and some beekeepers out of business, but Wiley said there is more to the story.
“I think the use of honeybees has overshadowed the fact that there are a lot of other pollinators out there,” he said. “That’s why there’s a lot to be said for a farm with a diversity of hay fields and pastures where pesticides aren’t used and where native species can survive, and that goes for all beneficial insects.”
David Rubin, the education coordinator at Venetucci Farm near Fountain, agrees, saying honeybees have huge economic importance, with obvious and direct consequences, but there are actually thousands of species of native bees, mostly solitary in nature. To attract them, Rubin has become adept at building wooden stands full of individual holes, which differ substantially from the more iconic honeycomb hives.
“It’s harder to manage native bees because they don’t live in colonies,” he said. “That’s why a lot of times hothouses and greenhouses will use bumble bees. They provide honey as well as pollination services.”
Local beekeepers, honey sellers and produce farmers are worried about the mysterious malady known as colony collapse disorder, which kills off hives, but most of them aren’t feeling any direct negative impacts — yet.
“Not to this point, but we are concerned,” said Frank Schmidt, of Schmidt Aviaries, who sells 40,000 pounds of honey at small stores and farmers markets in the area and keeps 600 hives north and south of Colorado Springs, mostly near fields of alfalfa — when he can find them.
“The farming is getting pretty limited around here,” he said.
Urbanization is only one of many challenges bees and their keepers are facing.
Schmidt had a booth set up at a recent screening of the documentary film “The Vanishing of the Bees,” part of Cross Pollination 2011, a community-wide three-month-long celebration of the role pollinators play in American life with a special emphasis on how to protect them. It kicked off just after Aug. 20, which is National Honeybee Awareness Day.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that bee pollination contributes $15 billion annually to the nation’s crop value. Honeybees in particular are responsible for 80 percent of the nation’s crop pollination. But in the 1980s they began to decline in numbers, as non-native pests such as mites infiltrated hives, and then in 2007, with the arrival of colony collapse disorder, a term coined for mass disappearances of bees from hives throughout North America, the buzz got even louder.
“The Vanishing of the Bees” tells the story of two Florida beekeepers who blew the whistle on the rare phenomenon after they noticed that the bees seemed to grow weak and listless before abandoning their hives entirely. It explains that while bees were already routinely trucked across the country to pollinate crops, when the number of U.S. bees became too low to adequately pollinate the almond orchards in California, bees started being shipped across oceans, too.
Along with the bees, honey itself is increasingly transcontinental. Large amounts of cheap honey are being imported and blended into domestic versions, which brings prices to consumers down but makes honey production less profitable. According to a recent report in Food Safety News, at least a third of all the honey consumed in the U.S. now comes from China, much of it illegally.
Still, honey prices have been trending higher in recent years, with the average retail price above $5 a pound so far in 2011.
Though researchers haven’t reached a conclusion on what is continuing to afflict the bees, the documentary shown in Colorado Springs makes the case that “systemic pesticides” (the kind with long residuals that are absorbed deep into plant tissues) are largely to blame, a claim that has lead to clashes between beekeepers, conventional farmers and big agribusiness companies worldwide. Political demonstrations in some parts of Europe have succeeded in sparking bans of certain products.
Modern beekeeping practices also include feeding bees sugar syrups and using artificial insemination for breeding purposes, which organic beekeepers question in the film.
One reason damage from the honeybee die-off has been limited so far is that farmers and gardeners benefit from a wide range of native pollinators including wild bees, wasps and moths. Honeybees are actually native to Europe and were introduced to the U.S.
Adam Smith, part of Smith Family Farm of Rocky Ford, runs a produce stand in Falcon and said customers often ask about whether the loss of honeybees is hurting the farm.
“It seems like we’ve been hearing about it a lot the last three or four years, but we’ve never had any trouble,” he said. “We always lose some bees over the winter, but that’s normal.”
“Last year we didn’t have any honeybees to speak of,” added Doug Wiley, who also farms in the Arkansas Valley near Boone. “I was worried about the melon crop, but we had an excellent crop. That taught me that the natives can hold things up, enough to keep it from being a failure, anyway.”
Colony collapse disorder has put bees in the spotlight and some beekeepers out of business, but Wiley said there is more to the story.
“I think the use of honeybees has overshadowed the fact that there are a lot of other pollinators out there,” he said. “That’s why there’s a lot to be said for a farm with a diversity of hay fields and pastures where pesticides aren’t used and where native species can survive, and that goes for all beneficial insects.”
David Rubin, the education coordinator at Venetucci Farm near Fountain, agrees, saying honeybees have huge economic importance, with obvious and direct consequences, but there are actually thousands of species of native bees, mostly solitary in nature. To attract them, Rubin has become adept at building wooden stands full of individual holes, which differ substantially from the more iconic honeycomb hives.
“It’s harder to manage native bees because they don’t live in colonies,” he said. “That’s why a lot of times hothouses and greenhouses will use bumble bees. They provide honey as well as pollination services.”
Buzz over beekeeping
Honeybees might be in jeopardy, but backyard beekeeping is booming nationwide. The vast majority of the country’s 200,000 or so beekeepers are hobbyists with less than five hives.
The Pikes Peak Beekeepers Association has “grown exponentially” in recent years and routinely attracts more than 100 participants to its annual beekeeping school, held in the spring, according to officer and master gardener Kim Gravestock.
Backyard beekeepers are unlikely to replace the pollination services so much of produce farming depends on, especially since bees generally stay within two miles of their home. But many gardeners still believe keeping them is healthy for the eco-system.
“The more small-time beekeepers we have, the more diversity we can create in the environment,” Gravestock said.
Colorado Springs and Denver both allow residents to keep bees. But Guy Lee, long-time beekeeper and the Pikes Peak association’s founder, said whether a place is suitable depends on the size of the property, the threat of bears and whether any of the neighbors are allergic to them.
Manitou Springs resident Kym Littleton got into beekeeping back in 1997 while working for a farmer in New Mexico who had a bee allergy. She enjoyed the experience so much that she’s had bees ever since.
She said she doesn’t think a lot about colony collapse disorder simply because there are already so many threats to healthy hives.
“We always worry about our bees,” she said. “You try to keep them as healthy as you can, but it’s a challenge.”
Colorado Springs is a difficult environment for beekeeping, she said. Availability of water and flowers, the short growing season, pests and pollution are all factors.
The University of Colorado-Colorado Springs driven Cross Pollination festival continues through November with special art exhibits, lectures, gardening workshops and a honey-harvesting demonstration in mid-September, all of which draw more consumers to the topic of food production and place further scrutiny on rapid changes in agricultural technology and production practices.
Wiley believes a complex mix of phenomena, not a single culprit, is likely causing the honeybee plague, a theory that has also been increasingly adopted by the research community.
Still, many organic farmers, gardeners and consumers see it as evidence that farm inputs and agronomic practices haven’t been studied enough, even while conventional farmers fret about how time-consuming and costly it is to bring new technology to the market.
“It’s a big industry, and it’s a dramatic development that the bees are disappearing like they are,” Venetucci’s Rubin said. “It’s the canary in the coal mine. It’s a cause for paying attention and making sure we figure this thing out.”
