Life-Sustaining Bees Dying Off Northwest Orchards Stung By Mites, Pesticides, Dwindling Ranks Of Keepers
They’re the world’s smallest migratory workers.
The little ladies also may be the hardest working and lowest paid. And they live in small boxes, about 30,000 to a room.
They may be tiny, but we can thank them for nearly one-third of the food we eat.
Honeybees pollinate seed crops, canola, and all the tree fruits, including apples, cherries, pears and peaches. They are responsible for $19 billion worth of agricultural crops nationwide.
And, as Jim Bach, Washington’s state apiarist stingingly puts it, without bees there’s nothing: “No bees. No pollination. No fruit.”
But one of the most important worker groups in agriculture is facing dangers it never has before.
Nature’s blights and people’s pesticides, politics and plans have conspired to make life for these tiny pollinators much less than a bed of roses.
At 4 a.m. one day in early April, Don Miner already had been up for hours.
He had loaded nearly a million bees onto his semitruck and was ready to fly down the quiet road into the light-streaked sky and toward a pear orchard north of Wenatchee.
Though commercial beekeepers sell honey from their hives, pollination is what keeps Miner and many others going from season to season.
The average beekeeper earns between $30 and $50 per colony per crop for the several-week service of pollinating an orchard.
But to be profitable, the bees must follow the bloom, starting as far south as the almond groves in California’s San Joaquin Valley and following the season in orchards to the north.
Miner’s bees spent late winter this year in the northern Sacramento Valley trying to pollinate the almond bloom amid El Nino’s heavy storms.
Then one cool March morning they woke up in a grassy field in Green Bluff, where Miner and his son Dennis unloaded the colonies to check their health, replace the ailing queens and prepare for Washington’s orchard season.
At such times, Miner uses all of his senses to stay attuned to the hives.
Suited like a Star Wars’ storm trooper in white coveralls and a bee helmet, he gingerly pried open a hive. He listened carefully. The sounds and smell clued him to the situation inside.
“This is a very good hive and a very good queen,” he said, as he pulled a bee-covered flat from the white box. “She’s laying a solid pattern,” he said and softly wiped away a few bees to see the honeycomb with the queen’s eggs.
Miner would be the first to point out that though the bees provide plenty of company, the job is a lonely one.
“The life of the beekeeper for us is that everything takes place in the middle of the night,” he said.
But a few issues have brought the usually nomadic and independent beekeepers together.
A freakish outbreak that hit the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1980s still shocks the industry.
Miner tells of a friend who found thousands of bees dead on the ground outside the hive. Miner and other beekeepers were bewildered.
“We were losing 70 percent to 80 percent of the bees each year,” he said. “We didn’t know what was killing them. We tried every backyard remedy and grandmother’s remedy and nothing seemed to work.”
The plague, they discovered, was a microscopic parasite, the tracheal mite, that clambered into a bee’s breathing tubes and lived off its blood.
If a bee is heavily infected, it will crawl away from the hive and die alone to save the rest of the colony. Usually, by the time the keeper notices the mite’s effect, it’s too late.
Compounding the problem, another mite, the varroa, crept onto the scene in 1987.
This mite, visible to the naked eye, crawls into a cell in the hive where a young bee is being raised and enters the bee’s ventral and abdominal segments.
Unfortunately, no absolute remedies exist for either mite, only costly medications to limit the extent of the infestations. About $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture supports research into the mites, but bees are a minor crop and don’t get the attention other livestock would.
Even with the medicines, U.S. beekeepers lose about 10 percent of their bees to mites each year. They would argue that though the bees are a minor crop, they should be a priority since so many other crops depend on them.
Long before the parasites, bees had an enemy in farmers. Every year, hundreds of colonies are lost when someone sprays pesticides on orchards or fields while the bees are working. Now Bach and others are teaching orchardists and farmers to check with beekeepers before spraying.
The pesticides not only eliminate the pests, but also wipe out other possible pollinators, like butterflies and moths, leaving growers almost entirely dependent on the honeybees.
With all the threats to harm the bees, one final danger lurks: the disappearing beekeeper.
Miner is cutting his hours and the number of hives as he approaches retirement. Like most U.S. beekeepers, he’s over 50 and like many, he’s still keeping the bees only because he loves to.
Since 1947, the number of U.S. beekeepers and bee colonies has declined. But in recent years that drop was accelerated by cheaper imported honey and the spread of mites.
The number of commercial beekeepers in the United States is down to 2,000. In Washington, it’s down to around 100.
Most, like Miner’s, are family operations, some third and fourth generation. But the next generation is looking for a more profitable, less demanding life.
“The economics plus the mites suggest that it isn’t the business to get into if you want to make money,” Bach said.
“Economically, it just doesn’t pencil out.”
A beekeeper invests about $110 per hive each year.
“When most of them are only grossing (for honey and pollination) about $115 to $120 per colony … they’re living on cash flow and not really making a profit,” Bach said.
Keepers are undercutting prices to compete with colonies within Washington as well as those that brokers bring in from Oregon, California and Idaho.
Though this would be the time for them to organize, regulate and set prices, a rift among beekeepers has brought Bach’s position and the state apiary program into question. For the past six years, fees from commercial beekeepers and orchardists have supported the Washington State Department of Agriculture apiary division, but hobbyists, who don’t pay the fee benefit from the program, said State Rep. Gary Chandler, R-Moses Lake.
“If I remember the figures right, about 90 percent of the fees are paid for by about 10 percent of the beekeepers,” he said. “The hobbyist wants a program, but doesn’t want to fund it.”
Bach sees it differently.
Beekeepers are independent people and a few have reacted against Bach’s efforts to organize and regulate the industry. They’re the ones who are trying to eliminate the program.
“The bee industry has been slow to join the current world of thinking: how to run a business, how to plan a business and how to make it a profit-making business,” he said.
More help from the orchardists appears unlikely. If beekeepers want to organize, they need to do it for themselves, said Vicky Sharlau, president of the Washington State Horticultural Association.
Growers reluctantly offer help because they often see bees as a separate industry and as another uncertain variable in their crop season.
“How does an orchardist know when a beekeeper comes in how healthy that hive is?” Sharlau asks. “There are a lot of wild cards in agriculture. This is an industry that depends on the weather, for God’s sake.”
Though the future for beekeeping looks bleak, people like John and Beki Steg, heirs to Steg Apiary and family tradition, may carry the business into the next century.
John Steg, 28, learned the art of beekeeping from his grandfather and three years ago took over the Oroville farm and apiaries hoping to expand from 700 hives to more than 1,000.
He’s probably the youngest independent commercial beekeeper in Washington. He knows the road ahead will be harder for him than it was for his grandfather.
“It’s a lot of hard work and most people don’t want to do it,” he said.
But he likes working for himself and he loves the bees. “I enjoy all of it,” he said. “There’s certain times, like pollination, when there’s a real adrenaline rush.”
While bad times might wipe out a number of commercial beekeepers, the industry is too important to agriculture for it to end.
Maybe the keepers will follow the example set by the hives, and as bees become so scarce that pollination prices rise, a new brood of beekeepers will emerge.
Graphic: How honeybees pollinate