Submitted by Jenny Wunderlich | Jefferson Post
Ashe County Beekeepers Association President Harry Galer opened his hives Saturday to find them empty. Beekeepers in the county and statewide are reporting unprecedented losses this year.
Beekeepers in Ashe County are reporting alarming losses this season as they open their beehives to find them mostly empty.
“Everybody is reporting losing at least one or two hives,” said Shelley Felder, proprietor of The Honey Hole in West Jefferson, who saw seven of her nine hives die off in December.
“On average people are losing 50 percent,” according to Ashe County Beekeepers Association (ACBA) Program Director Doug Ehrhardt.
Harry Galer, President of the ACBA, opened his hives at his Crumpler home Saturday morning to find he had no bees at all.
Galer said he planned to recommend the ACBA do a survey get a handle on the true extent of losses in the county. “We’ll talk about this in our next meeting,” he said.
Based on reports she had heard, Felder said, “We have fared much better up here than the Piedmont or the Coastal Plains.”
President of the North Carolina Beekeepers Association Danny Jaynes of Raleigh said numerous reports of “devastating losses” statewide were only anecdotal at this time — no hard figures are available. But, said Jaynes, “50 or more percent statewide would not surprise me.”
North Carolina is home to more commercial and hobbyist beekeepers than any other state, according to Erhrardt.
Similar hive deaths have been reported along the Eastern Seaboard, throughout the Southeast and in Texas, Jaynes said.
On an April 2 edition of ABC’s Dan Rather Reports, some of the nation’s biggest beekeepers reported losses of up to 90 percent this year.
Some Ashe County beekeepers, including Felder, cited last winter’s “crazy weather” as one possible cause of hive failure locally. They theorize a scattering of warm winter days enticed bees out to forage just in time to be killed off when the temperature suddenly dropped again at night.
Jaynes disagreed. A 130-million-year-old species, honey bees are well-adapted to coping with weather variations, he argued.
Massive honey bee losses have been in the media frequently in recent years with the onset in the U.S. of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in 2006. Despite years of research by scientists and entomologists, the precise cause of CCD has not been proven beyond doubt, Jaynes said.
But, he said, widespread use of a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids has been fingered as a likely suspect. Chemically similar to nicotine, they affect insects’ central nervous systems, and are thought to have a disorienting effect on bees, preventing them from finding their way back to the hive after foraging in areas where insecticides are present.
A 1999 Japanese agricultural study, “Nicotine to Nicotinoids: 1962 to 1997,” found that these chemicals are the most widely used insecticides in the world.
Ashe County beekeepers claim misapplication of insecticides on Christmas tree farms is a prime factor in colony collapse in the High Country. Department of Agriculture guidelines require that trees be sprayed at night to minimize harm to bees, who are active during the day, Jaynes said.
A large majority of tree farmers comply, he said, but it only takes a handful of violators to create a dangerous situation, with particulate chemicals carried away from treated areas by the wind. “When they spray in the middle of the day it’s devastating,” he said.
Honey bees have no organs for filtering toxins out of their bodies, Felder said, so even sub-lethal amounts of chemicals stay with them and are taken back to the hive.
“Bee’s are an indicator species,” Felder said. “They’re like the canary in the coal mine; when an environment is toxic they’re the first to know.”
A healthy honey bee population is crucial to N.C. agriculture, Jaynes said. Staple fruit crops like apples, peaches, strawberries and blueberries, as well as greenhouse and nursery products, will be in shorter supply with fewer bees available for pollination. Prices will rise accordingly, he said.
Even small farmers with just a few acres of strawberries are worried there might not be enough bees for adequate pollination, he said. “I get calls everyday: ‘Have you got bees?’”
Asked why there seemed to be no public outcry over such a serious problem, Jaynes said, “There’ll be a public outcry at the end of the season when there’s a shortage of vegetables.”
“One in every 12 jobs in the state is in agriculture,” Felder said, adding that about quarter to a third of the food we eat cannot be produced without honey bees.
On Monday April 8, I was working with Travis Birdsell, County Extension Agent in Ashe County and Brad Edwards, Integrated Pest Management Program Assistant with our pollinator study in Christmas trees. We have successfully maintained a beehive on Omni Farms in Ashe County since June of last year. When we checked the bees today, they were very active and doing well. I have also been looking at native bees that forage in Christmas tree fields. Last year in Ashe, Alleghany, Watauga, Avery and Mitchell Counties, I followed wildflowers blooming in six tree fields and captured pollinators which included bumblebees, honeybees, mining bees, large and small carpenter bees, sweat bees, yellow faced bees, digger bees, butterflies, and many others.
Ground cover management around tree fields which encourage blooming plants provide forage for many types of pollinators. The problem comes in when a grower does need to treat for an insect or mite pest, which typically happens once or perhaps twice a year. In many cases, growers can spray at night, and then there appears to be few problems. Other times, because of the difficulty of controlling certain pests, the grower needs to spray during the day. If that is the case, they can use a low rate of herbicide to burn back the flowers without killing the valuable ground covers. Then the bees have no reason to be in the field as Fraser fir does not produce flowers that attract bees.
Christmas tree growers do not use imidacloprid at all, the main chemical that has been associated with colony collapse disorder. Since 2011, some growers have used another neonicotinoid, dinotefuran, to control our most problematic pest, the elongate hemlock scale. This pest, which is also found on hemlocks in the wild, is not native to the US but is from the Orient. It is very difficult to control. One of the reasons I am looking at pollinators in Christmas trees is because of the use of this new material.
I am also conducting a small survey of beekeepers in western NC and would be happy to report on the results when I get them all back.
Sadly, most insecticides are toxic to bees, since they are of course insects. Even organic insecticides such as spinosad are just as toxic to bees as imidacloprid. The key is to use materials when bees are not actively foraging such as at night or when no flowers are present. For instance, home gardeners that use Sevin dust when pollen shedding plants are present are one of the worst problems with bees as they think the chemical is pollen and take it back to the hive.
I have created a website reviewing the pollinator study which is at: http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/fletcher/programs/xmas/control/pollinator/index.html
If anyone has any questions about this study, please contact me at jill_sidebottom@ncsu.edu.
I would like to thank Shelley Felder of the Honey Hole for her help in setting up our beehive and her expert advice on bee care. I would also like to thank the North Carolina Christmas Tree Association for the grant that helped fund this research and for Wiley Gimlin and Omni Farms for being our test case just to see how hard it was to manage a beehive near Christmas trees. This work is continuing this year with hives going out in an Alleghany and an Avery County tree field.