Growers Stung by a Decline in Honeybees

The apple blossoms used to shake and shiver every spring.

A loud, insistent buzz thrummed in Bob Barthel’s ears when he was a boy, climbing in his father’s orchard. He worried in those days about getting stung by the throngs of wild honeybees jostling for nectar in the flowers.

Now that he is 39 and managing the farm, Barthel has sharply different concerns. The apple trees were still and silent this year, but he is far from pleased.

Growing season has begun. Barthel pulled out a pocketknife to slice open a tiny Ginger Gold, revealing holes where he expected seeds. “This fruit didn’t pollinate,” he said, brow furrowed. “There are two, maybe three, seeds and there should be 10. It’ll stay this size.”

Although the Legislature anointed the honeybee as Wisconsin’s official state insect--taking a pass on the dragonfly, the ladybug, the monarch butterfly and the mosquito--the breed appears to have vanished here, and in much of the United States.

The big die-off--a dramatic event that follows years of decline--portends long-term trouble for growers and consumers of apples, cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, watermelons, cantaloupes and cucumbers, to name just a few of the crops that depend on honeybees to coat flowers with pollen so fruit can form.

The American Beekeeping Federation says 67% of this state’s commercial hives were killed over the long, cold winter--victims of the weather and of two mites that severely, often fatally, weaken their hosts. Wild bees were decimated.

Reporting results of a 22-state survey last month, the federation noted similar problems all over, particularly in the East and Midwest: “Arkansas, 25% loss. Almost at a point of being under-pollinated. . . . Georgia: 15% loss. Bee shortage for squash very acute. . . . Maine: 80% loss. . . . Michigan: 60% loss. . . . New Jersey: 60% loss. No feral colonies left alive to speak of. . . . New York: 60%-70% loss.”

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Food for forest animals will be hardest hit this year. “The wildlife that depend on the berries are going to feel it now,” said Hachiro Shimanuki, research leader at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee research laboratory in Maryland. “Bears, deer, birds need blackberries and wild blueberries.”

Backyard gardeners in areas suffering from a shortage of bees should likewise expect sparse pickings this year.

Larger-scale growers like Barthel cope by importing commercial honeybees to their fields, competing for busy beekeepers who charge to haul in wooden “hives,” also known as apiaries, for a week or two. The exercise would have been unimaginable in his father’s day.

Yet there aren’t as many beekeepers as there used to be; their numbers have declined nationally by 23% since 1994. They have lost much of their stock. Instead of dragging the survivors from farm to farm, they would much prefer this year to concentrate on honey-making; the product’s price has doubled after 20 stagnant years.

If the trend continues, said Barthel’s partner, Nino Ridgway, who is an entomologist, “I’m concerned about the future of crop production. There could be a real crisis in four or five years.”

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Dave Green, a South Carolina apple grower-turned-beekeeper agreed: “Already, you see it at the produce markets more and more. Stunted, poor-quality fruit was not adequately pollinated. The kind that makes you feel gassy means you didn’t get that bee in that blossom.”

The first portent of an apian Armageddon came in 1984 in Texas, with sighting of the tracheal mite. The parasite moves into a bee’s breathing system and feeds on the blood of its host.

In 1987, here in Wisconsin, the varroa mite showed up. About the size of the head of a pin, the reddish-brown varroa lodges on the bee’s exterior, hitchhiking through the colony to find newly hatched babies to eat. Once the supply of youngsters runs out, these mites turn on the oldest adults.

Both pests have spread throughout the country, helped along by the bands of migrant beekeepers who generally travel south in the winter and north in the summer.

“Before varroa and the tracheal mite, we never lost more than 15% of our bees, even in the colder winters,” said Anette Phibbs, a bee cultivation expert with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

This is of no small importance here. Not only is Wisconsin the country’s 10th-largest honey producer, it also leads the nation in cranberries, a crop notoriously difficult to pollinate, thus dependent on large numbers of bees.

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Last spring, over-winter fatalities reached 29%, even though the temperatures were relatively mild. This year, of course, the bees dropped like flies.

“The local bee is dead,” said Gary Truettner, a berry grower in Manitowoc County.

Truettner had to cast about to find a beekeeper who had enough of the insects, time and inclination to pollinate his six-acre strawberry patch on the Lake Michigan shore. This is his inaugural season, after eight years preparing the property, and he knew he’d need “a safety device.” As winter waned, he spied no honeybees and only two bumblebees--much less efficient as pollinators. Bumblebees also are underground nesters with more exposure to agricultural pesticides.

He called one local keeper who strictly deals in honey. The answer was no. He checked with someone 30 miles away who was ready to head to Florida, with plans to loose his flock in citrus groves for a harvest of orange blossom honey. Sympathetic, this man said that as a favor, he’d bring over two apiaries--although one hive per acre is the rule of thumb--but he’d really rather not.

Finally, through a friend in the apple business, Truettner contacted Chris Werner of Germantown, about 65 miles away.

Werner agreed to take on the task. Lately, he’s been a traveling man. For the first time in 13 years of pollination work, he’s been called as far north as the Door County cranberry bogs, more than a two-hour drive.

He can help out only because he took 800 hives to Kissimee, Fla., in November. Those bees survived.

By January, having made phone calls to his Wisconsin neighbors, Werner knew the residents of 900 hives he’d left behind were facing mortal danger.

He drove up in March to get some equipment and took the opportunity to open some of the boxes. Inside were “gobs of dead bees. . . . It was heartbreaking.”

The winter before, he’d lost 10% of his bees. This spring, from his Wisconsin stock, he could fill just 40 hives. The death rate was higher than 90%.

Although he is more interested in clover honey production--he fills 55-gallon drums with the stuff for a large bread franchise operation--Werner has taken on a few newcomers, largely out of pity, and is servicing his longtime customers. But his bees come at a much higher price than last year. The cranberry fee, for example, rose from $40 to $60 per hive.

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Barthel is one of Werner’s regulars. His father laughed when he started bringing in bees 10 years ago, having read in trade journals that the wild bee population was at risk.

This year, he was convinced of the wisdom of his ways when he couldn’t spot even one flying through 35 acres of orchard. With Werner still in Florida, Barthel got a neighbor to bring in five hives maintained as a hobby, but that wasn’t enough. Besides, the bees were quite weak. They couldn’t conduct much business.

The apples are due to ripen in September. “We’re setting ourselves up for a major loss,” Barthel said.

Across a dirt road from the stand of apples, his strawberries are now setting fruit. Werner has placed 16 hives at the edge of the lane.

It’s not easy to shake the old attitudes. “Every time I pay for this, I wince a little,” Barthel said. “You don’t see a direct impact.”

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In California, however, the significance of the commercial bee has not been questioned for years. There never have been many “free bees,” and so “we’re really hooked” on the cultivated variety, said Eric Mussen, extension apiculturist at UC Davis. The 400,000-acre California almond crop, for example, requires two hives per acre.

The state’s resident bees, enjoying balmy climes, were more resilient than most of the rest of the nation’s this year. The worst of the tracheal and varroa invasions seems over, Mussen said, although “you still can’t ignore it” and the necessary treatment is time-consuming and expensive enough that some beekeepers have abandoned the industry.

Menthol vapors can control the tracheal mite. Plastic strips coated with a chemical called apistan can combat varroa if hung in the frames that hold honeycombs in the hives. The pesticide, however, can interfere with honey-making, so its application must be carefully controlled.

The woes elsewhere are being closely watched as well. With 50 crops in California requiring commercial bees, so many are needed that about half are delivered from other spots. They come from places like South Dakota (with, the beekeeping federation wrote, a loss of “30% to 60% reported”), Montana (“1% loss, but several hobbyists wiped out”) and Massachusetts (“Losses range 55%-75%”).