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Trouble with honeybees
Natural History, May, 1997 by Sue Hubbell
Last year, parasitic mites and harsh winter weather eliminated 80 percent of the honeybee colonies in some parts of the country.
When European settlers arrived on the shores of North America in the seventeenth century and discovered to their dismay that there were no honeybees here, they set about importing them. Never mind that more than 3,500 species of native bees were buzzing about, energetically pollinating the native plants and the few crops--including squash and beans--grown by the people the settlers called Indians. Those bees do not produce useful amounts of wax or honey. Only honeybees do that, and without them the settlers lacked good-quality wax with which to make candles to light their dark days and darker nights and had to make do with myrtle wax or tallow from beef or deer. Without honeybees, they also lacked the major ingredient of mead, an alcoholic drink made from fermented honey and water. And last of all, they had no honey to sweeten their food.
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The early settlers weren't interested in the pollination work that the native bees--or even honeybees--could do because they weren't aware of it. The role of insects in botanical fertilization was not clearly known until the late 1700s, long after the first recorded importation of European honeybees (Apis mellifera) to this continent. That report appears in a letter dated 1621 and written in the English office of the Virginia Company: "wee have by this shippe sent . . . fruit trees, as also pigeons . . . and bee hives . . . the preservation and increase hereof wee recommend unto you." If these bees survived the ocean voyage (of which there is no record), they would have prospered in Virginia and could have been the origin of swarms that spread westward in the following years. Sometime between 1630 and 1663, honeybees were also brought to New England to brighten the lives of colonials there.
By 1800, swarming feral honeybees, nesting in tree hollows, had reached the Mississippi. In the 1850s, the bees were brought by ship to the West Coast, where their population was soon increased by bees carried overland by settlers, who kept them in cramped hives inside hollow logs. During the next half century, with the invention of better beekeeping equipment and the development of an industry to manufacture and sell it, honeybees, both feral and cared-for, were to be found throughout the United States.
Once the honeybees' role in pollination had been added to the list of their known virtues, farmers began setting out hives in orchards to increase fruit yield. But it wasn't until the present century, as agribusiness transformed farming in many parts of the country, that honeybee pollination services became a business as well. Tractors powered by internal combustion engines (already in use by the late 1800s) and the caterpillar tread (used in World War I tanks) may have given large-scale agriculture a push. The shortage of men to do heavy hand labor during World War II, the design of ever-more sophisticated farm machinery, and the development of pesticides all contributed to dramatic changes in American agriculture. Farms became bigger, and machines took over much of the hard labor. Large plantings of single crops--monoculture--became the rule.
Beekeepers learned to take advantage of both mechanization and the growing agricultural need for pollination, and once again, the bee of choice was the honeybee. Many crops, especially those cultivated on a large scale--such as alfalfa and oranges--are not native to North America and may have bloom times that are more in sync with the population peaks of the introduced honeybee than with those of native species. In addition, most native bees fly no farther than 100 to 200 yards from their nests and have solitary nesting habits that make them harder to manage.
Grouping four or five hives of honeybees on a pallet, modern beekeepers use forklifts and boom loaders to load and unload pallets from trailers, truck them from place to place as different crops come into bloom, and move on before the fields are sprayed with insecticides. The fee they receive for this service has become a more important source of income for some beekeepers than has honey. In recent decades, another, easily managed exotic bee--the alfalfa leaf-cutter bee--has come to play a significant role in commercial pollination, particularly of alfalfa. Together these two introduced bees account for about 90 percent of agribusiness crop pollination in the United States.
But now, the honeybees on which we have become so dependent are in trouble. In the spring of 1996, almond growers in California were advertising that they would pay $34 per colony for beekeepers to bring honeybees to their trees. This is up from the $22 per colony that beekeepers were charging in the 1980s. In Maine, it was hard to find honeybees at any price last year.
Like all animals, honeybees get sick and have parasites, but over the years, beekeepers had learned how to help their bees stay healthy. Once a disease or pest takes hold in any large population, however, it can spread rapidly. In the last fifteen years, two particularly devastating species of parasitic mites have shown up in American hives. One, Varroa jacobsoni, parasitizes bee larvae; the other, Acarapis wood), infests the trachea of adult bees. Treatments have been far from perfect; 15 jacobsoni has begun to show resistance to the chemical American beekeepers have been using to fight it and breeders have so far failed to develop a totally mite-resistant bee.
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