The importance of honeybees

Hello – glad you’re here! The purpose of this blog is to educate! I’ll be talking about honey bees, how and why they are important to us, what some of the problems are that they face, and what we can do to help. This has been a pet project of mine for nearly a year now – but you can read more about me in my profile…I will include photos where I can, and educational links as they come up and are appropriate, so if you work with children through Scouting, or after school programs, or if you’re an educator, or perhaps you just want a better understanding of the articles you’ve been seeing in all the newspapers, then I hope you’ll find this blog helpful.

First of all, honeybees are incredible pollinators. What does that mean? Lets look at where our food really comes from. Approximately 72% of agricultural plants are pollinated in some way, and honeybees are responsible for about 80% of that. So, if you like chocolate, or almonds, tomatoes, plums, peaches, etc., then you have a honeybee most likely to thank for making that food available to you. In short, when a honeybee pollinates a plant, she is actually foraging for nectar and pollen for herself. But it’s a messy process, and she ends up with pollen all over her, stuck in the hairs of her body. (Remember this fact when we begin to talk about pesticide use) Some of this pollen drops off at the next flower when he lands, providing the other half of the genetic material necessary for the plant to produce a seed, or fruit, or vegetable. Without pollination, the plant doesn’t yield, and you don’t get a new plant.

Honeybees are not native to the US – they were imported from Europe by early American settlers. The Indians called them “white man’s flies”. They themselves had depended on wind pollination and native bees – some referred to as mason bees. Native bees do not produce honey.

Wheat is one of the plants pollinated by wind. Scientist now are trying to work with wheat to form other products that will taste and feel like fruits and vegetables. What does this tell you? That they are aware of the problems the honeybees face, and while many scientists are working to correct the problems, some are looking ahead in case of a worse case scenario. You see, bees are dying in large numbers, and scientists are baffled. We will talk more of this a bit later when we discuss Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). But for now, try imagining something like a food replicator – perhaps like one on Star Wars, where you walk up and say, “Strawberry”, and it hums and spits out a replicated strawberry. In my mind, it could never taste the same – and do they plan on injecting it with all the vitamins and minerals you would get from a real strawberry? For you Firefly fans, remember when Shepherd brought real strawberrys onto the ship? They were a delicacy to die for. Probably hand pollinated, but nonetheless real.

So this is why honeybees are important to us.

Some of the problems honeybees face

This section will discuss some of the problems honeybees face. We’ll break it down into two categories: commercial and urban or residential.

The honeybee raised on a bee farm, who is rented out to pollinate crops, has a tough life. They often travel long distances to farms to do their business of pollination. Many farms have their own bees, but many rent them, and it is a big business. The farmers must take care with the chemicals they use, some chemicals are highly toxic to bees and can cause death, while other chemicals are regarded as safe in the early morning or late evening when bees are not out of the hive, and still other are classified as only mildly toxic. However, the strength of the toxicity is not the only thing to consider. How it is applied is a factor. Some plants take the pesticide up and it becomes “systemic” poisoning the nectar and pollen. Others that come in a dust or encapsulated form can get caught in the hair of the bee and then be taken back to the hive and stored, or be fed to larval bees, regardless of the time of day. This could set up a situation where bees are dying for months because of stored poisons in the hive. For instance, a farmer uses a dust in early morning on his sweet corn, and it catches in the tassels of the corn. This is where the honeybee will get her pollen, and her poison. For this reason, many pamphlets have been printed for use in agricultural circles on avoiding bee toxicity. They list each chemical by scientific and brand name, its toxicity, and its method of distribution so that the farmer can make informed choices.

However, the honeybees sent to the farms often have many acres of just one crop to pollinate. If you or I ate only one thing for a period of time, we’d not be very healthy. Honeybees need variety in their diet as well. Some studies have shown that honeybees do better with a variety in their diet, with reduced pesticides obviously, such as one highlighted by the Nature film, Silence of the Bees, where in France the honeybees did better in the city than in the rural areas. It was recommended that farmers border fields with lavender and sunflowers to help provide more variety in the bee’s diet to enhance their health. The same film also referred to an area in China where orchard pollination is now done by hand because there are no bees anymore. Tiny feathers are used to transfer pollen from one bloom to another – painstaking work. This is what we hope to avoid by making the problems better understood.

Likewise, in urban areas, we tend to overuse chemicals here in the US. Why use a tablespoon of Sevin dust when you can use two or three just to make absolutely sure that the cucumber grown in your backyard garden will be worm free…remember – if you want it pollinated, do NOT use Sevin dust! If you walk into any hardware store and browse the rows of chemicals available for the myriad of problems you may encounter with fleas, or with your roses, they will not say on the face of the lable, “Harmful to Bees”. You must pull back the consumer pamphlet stuck to the back, and look to the very end, on the back, in very fine print, and then you will find the words “toxic to bees.” They don’t make it easy to educate yourself so you can do the right thing – you really have to be a believer and search for the info. So, for all you backyard gardeners, please, please take the time to find a cure for your garden ills that won’t hurt the bees. Some people have taken time to educate themselves and erect backyard hives, or rooftop hives, in an effort to help honeybees. The honeybees will be a huge benefit to their neighbors’ flowers and vegetable gardens, and the neighbors may even share in the honey production later in the fall, but if the general public is unaware that many common pesticides available for residential use are toxic to bees, then even the backyard hobbyist faces a problem for his honeybees. Likewise, when your exterminator comes to call, if you have a hive in your neighborhood, you should let him know – it may make a difference as to which chemical he chooses to use as a barrier around the outside of your home, and he will be able to judge the wind speed and how far it will carry beyond your home when applied.

Then there are the tracheal mites, which tend to plague commercial beekeepers and hobbyists alike. These little parasites work their way into the bee’s tiny bodies and ravage them. The scientific community believes that stress (whether it be from long moves or lack of variety in diet), chemical toxicity, and parasites, all work together to take a toll on the honeybees immune system, making them more susceptible to bacterial and fungal infections, and yes, death. When a bee keeper walks out to inspect his hives, and hears no humming, but instead find tens of thousands of dead bees at the entrance to the hive on the ground, we call this Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD.

CCD has been occurring for some time now, and it is estimated that if it continues at its present rate, there will be NO MORE HONEYBEES by the year 2035 – that is only 25 years from now. I wonder if the food replicators will be up and working by then…

A look at the life cycle of honeybees

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the life cycle of the honeybee. Most people are amazed at how organized they are. For example, how do honeybees know to make every single cell six-sided, and the ones on the back which make up the other side of the honeycomb precisely off-set to prevent a rupture all the way through! Honeybees will actually link themselves to each other to measure an area before deciding just how big to make their honeycomb! But to properly look at the life cycle, we must begin with the bee that makes it all happen.

Let’s start with the queen. Each hive has only one. All of the worker bees are female. There are a few male bees, which we call drones, but their sole purpose in life is to mate with the unmated queen to give her a lifetime supply of materials for egg production. Once she has successfully mated, she will not mate again. Therefore, although a few more drones will be made, they may not necessarily be used. They do not forage, and must be fed. When resources in the hive are scarce, you guessed it; they are the first to go.

Once the queen has been inseminated, she will begin laying eggs – up to 2,000 a day, but we commonly see more on the order 1,200 a day. She may lay as many as 200,000 over a season. After three years, a queen will begin to slow down, and that is when the workers decide a new queen is needed; they realize the importance of keeping the number in the hive steady. The workers prepare special cells for ordinary eggs, and only feed the larvae in those cells royal jelly, a substance milked from a gland in the worker bee’s head. This creates a queen. Worker bee larvae receive pollen and nectar instead, much of which has been stored from other bees that’ve been out foraging and have brought home the groceries, which hopefully haven’t been poisoned. The new queen emerges after 16 days, kills off the competition of other emerging queens – they usually have a back-up or two, and she leaves the hive on her maiden voyage to mate with the drones. Once out, she is not very particular about whom she mates with, and it is possible she will mate with a species of bee that would not be desirable in a backyard hive. Many hobbyists and backyard beekeepers import docile bees for use in populated areas, so to prevent their hives from becoming aggressive, they will re-queen every year or two with a queen of the same species to prevent this from happening. What happens to the old queen? The beekeeper will finish her off, or if this happens in nature, several things might happen. One, they might fight to the death, or as in the case of a stalemate, one of the queens might take half the hive and leave for destinations unknown…but back to the honeybee.

The worker bee begins her life as an egg for the first three days, and then becomes a feeding larva, being tended to by other worker bees. She will spend about six days feeding before she spins her cocoon and as a pupae she will transform into a honeybee beneath the closed cap of her cell. This process takes another 11 days, so on or about day 21, she knocks the cap loose, climbs out, cleans out her cell so it can be reused, and spends the next 24 – 48 hours keeping other brood warm. Now that she has her land legs, she’ll spend the next 36 hours feeding older larvae, and then she’ll spend the next 6 days feeding the younger larvae, which is more demanding. The following six days she’ll spend producing wax, building honeycomb for further storage, and transporting food around the hive. Now that she is strong, she will spend the next four days guarding the hive entrance, and then afterwards, she will spend the rest of her life, somewhere between 15 and 25 days, foraging the fields for pollen and nectar. So, when you see a honeybee out pollinating flowers, this is an older bee, who has already gone through a rigorous training program within the hive; a bee who has learned all of the jobs necessary to make the hive run…impressive, huh?

What you can do to help

So, given all of this – the question remains as to what can be done by the individual that will make the slightest impact on this huge, global problem.

In a nutshell, the answer is education. Educate yourself, educate others. If more people understood what is happening today, then hopefully better choices could be made, and when everyone is making better choices, great things can happen!

Follow the news, follow legislation, take care how you handle pesticides, and how your neighbor handles them as well.

Take a class, if you’re so inclined. I did. Many classes on beekeeping can be found in most cities. I took mine through Leisure Learning, and it was taught by Mr. Donald Burger, Vice President of the Houston Beekeeping Association. I found it to be very informative. In fact, the website for HAB is www.houstonbeekeepers.org, and he has a page on Africanized bee facts, if you’re interested.

You could start a backyard hive of your own, but take care to check your city ordinances. Some areas will not allow beekeeping, others will.

Create a pollinator garden of your own, or at your church, or with your local elementary school, junior high, or high school. This is what I did, and I combined educating the students, and area Girl Scouts, with planting and maintaining pollination gardens. The gardens serve to provide increased areas of foraging habitats to keep local honeybees healthy. Dadant is one company that provides beekeeping supplies, but they also have some great teaching tools (which is where I got mine for the classes I taught), such as coloring books, life cycle posters, incredible picture cards big enough to be seen from the back of a classroom with great info on the back – their website is www.dadant.com they also have an online catalogue. If you need patches, I found one that says “insects” but it shows a honeybee and a sunflower which was perfect for my needs. The website for the patch is www.advantageemblem.com. I looked for educational info that I might be able to use through Texas A & M, but didn’t find anything – perhaps they could assign a graduate student to develop one like Berkeley has which covers pollinator gardens and includes a study sheet your students can use to track bees once the garden has bloomed - nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens/ (don’t use www. on this address). While you’re surfing Berkeley urban bee gardens, be sure you go to their urban bee legend page – it has some great info. There is also a great website to use with your own children at www.fws.gov/pollinators/ which has posters, podcasts, activity guides, etc., and they include all pollinators, such as bats and hummingbirds, not just honeybees.

The next section of this blog will highlight my project “Bee Friendly”.