THE DROUGHT AGRICULTURE : Starving Bees to Feed Far From Home
When beekeeper Red Bennett looks out at Ventura County’s parched hillsides, he sees the death of his colonies written on the missing wildflowers.
Four years of below-average rainfall have wiped out native plants that provide nectar to bees, said Bennett, who keeps 1,500 hives and sells honey at a stand in Piru. This year, more than any other, Bennett and others in the apiary industry are in trouble.
“The extended drought is really hurting us,” Bennett said. Without the wildflowers, the bees “could quite literally starve,” he said.
Decimated by parasites and weakened by pesticides, the swarms will soon be moved out of state by the beekeepers in a desperate attempt to keep them alive.
After the citrus and avocado bloom ends, bee colonies that normally feed in Ventura County will be shipped north in transport trucks to the San Joaquin Valley and the Midwest. They will return in the fall as eucalyptus trees come into bloom.
But even that may not be enough to keep the bees alive year-round. Bennett and other apiary owners have begun supplementing the bees’ diets with foods that the bees cannot gather for themselves when they come home to Ventura County.
“We’ve had to feed our bees large amounts of syrup. We’ve also had to provide the bees with pollen substitutes just to keep them alive through the winter,” Bennett said.
The drought has already cut into the beekeepers’ profits by reducing the production of sage honey. And as summer progresses, beekeepers are unsure if there will be a sufficient quantity of other varieties, such as citrus, avocado and eucalyptus, to make up the difference.
Moisture-starved native plants have become more scarce each year.
Bennett said he is seeing fewer native wildflowers, such as California wild buckwheat, rabbit brush and blue curl, which supply the precious nectar for honeybees.
“We should have less wildflowers than we did last year, and less sage bloom,” said Ron Basset, a ranger in the Ojai district of the Los Padres National Forest. “We’re seeing in the vegetation stress from lack of moisture.”
Bees are responsible for the pollination of between 60% to 70% of the crops grown in California, from avocado and citrus and row crops in Ventura County, to cotton and alfalfa cultivated in irrigated soil in the San Joaquin Valley, said Don Strachan, president of the California State Beekeepers Assn., which represents about 600 commercial beekeepers.
To make up for the loss in nectar from sage and wildflowers, beekeepers are offering bee pollination services to farmers at $30 a hive. But the fees will barely make up for the lost honey production, beekeepers say.
Apiary owners say the drought is one of the primary reasons that Ventura County’s honey and beeswax industry has been so unstable in the last decade.
Beekeepers produced more honey and beeswax in 1989 than they did 10 years ago, but their total income has declined, according to Ventura County Agricultural Commission reports.
While costs of transporting and maintaining beehives have risen during the past decade, the price of honey has remained relatively stable, about 55 cents a pound. The dollar value of honey and beeswax produced in the county declined to less than $875,000 last year after peaking at $1.3 million in 1983.
But Agricultural Commission biologist Ann McClure said that gauging the importance of bees by the dollar value of their products is deceiving.
“It’s hard to come up with a figure for the value of pollination,” McClure said. Bees are “important to all of agriculture because they pollinate, whether the beekeepers get paid for it or not. It’s still a valuable service that they do.”
There are at least 600,000 registered bee colonies around the state, or about 24 million bees kept commercially for honey and wax, said Len Foote, chief of the control and eradication branch of the state Department of Food and Agriculture.
Two pests, the tracheal mite and the varroa mite, have become the two most dangerous enemies to bees, Foote said.
Commercial operations statewide have been hurt by the combination of the drought, pests and bee boycotts, an industry official said.
“I call honeybees the backbone of agriculture,” Strachan said. “And it’s being strained right now.”
The economics of beekeeping are growing grimmer each year, Strachan said.
Beekeepers see a fifth of their colonies die off each year because of disease and pesticides, Strachan said. And the increasing cost of transporting bees around the country to feed them and make honey is cutting into profits, he added.
When beekeepers truck their bees hundreds of miles away to pollinate groves and farms in the San Joaquin Valley, the Dakotas and Minnesota, they pay a price for feeding their bees in out-of-state fields.
At $10 per hive for a round-trip journey, many commercial beekeepers are beginning to take their chances in fields closer to home.
Don Schram, who heads the Ventura County Beekeepers Assn., said he will send his bees to cotton and alfalfa fields in Kettleman City in the San Joaquin Valley during the summer, instead of trucking them out of state.
However, cotton and alfalfa fields in the San Joaquin Valley are heavily sprayed with pesticides, and it is dangerous to keep colonies in those fields too long, Schram said.
Schram, 50, started keeping bees as a hobby in 1970 and has seen his colonies grow to 2,000 hives. Five years ago, half of them began to die off, he says, because of pesticides and pests. He now owns about 1,000.
But Schram is in a better position than most because he sells his honey through the Sioux Honey Assn., a marketing cooperative based in Anaheim. Most of the other dozen beekeepers in Ventura County are not so lucky and will have to make it on their own, Schram said.
