Honeybees, humans need each other
Honeybees are very important to agriculture. Whether their impact is on your garden at home or a huge farm, honeybees are the major pollinators of almonds, blueberries, peaches, strawberries and many other crops. They also provide many products, including honey, beeswax and pollen. However, they are in trouble.
But before we talk about concerns, let's talk about honeybees. Notice we are not saying "bees." That's because there are many types of bees, and some of them are good pollinators, too. However, hives of honeybees are mobile, and they can be moved to crops needing pollination and then moved again. While other pollinators can help with crop propagation, the cost for many of our fruits and vegetables and other products would be a great deal higher without the help of honeybees.
Honeybees and humans have worked in partnership for centuries. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics depict the presence of honeybees more than 4,000 years ago, and we know bees were valued in ancient China and Mesopotamia. There's also a reason the Promised Land was referred to as the land of milk and honey.
Beekeepers manipulate and manage what honeybees do, but no one controls honeybees. We can only influence them and make it easier for them to do their thing.
Honeybees are individual organisms that live in a colony that functions like one organism. While each honeybee has a task every day, together, all bees perform their instinctive tasks to preserve the colony.The colony consists of three types of honeybees. The first is the queen. This honeybee is the only fertile female in the hive. The queen mates with several different drones during a mating flight (or flights) shortly after she hatches, and then she never mates again. She is basically an egg-laying machine. A queen during the height of her fertility, when the colony is building population to gather nectar and pollen during the peak flows in summer, can lay more than 1,000 eggs per day. Queens can live four to five years and are replaced when they begin to be less fertile and productive.The different treatment of a few larvae result in queen cells being developed. The first new queen that hatches stings the other developing queens through the walls of their cells and kills the older queen. A hive can be a tough place, but remember, all these things happen for the good of the colony. If the queen would somehow be lost without any larvae to develop into new queens, the colony would die.Queens also determine the sex of the resulting bees when they lay eggs. Queens lay a few fertile eggs, called drones, and thousands of infertile eggs, resulting in infertile females we call workers.Drones are fertile males who have only one function, which is to mate with queen bees. Drones are tolerated during the summer, but serve no other viable need. At the end of the summer, drones are forced out of the hive to die.Worker bees clean cells so the queen has a pristine place to lay eggs. They also build replacement honeycomb; feed and tend to the queen and the drones; gather nectar and pollen; and defending the hive against attack by other honeybees, hornets, wasps, skunks, raccoons, bears and the list goes on.Workers that hatch during the summer, going into the peak of the honey flow, live about six weeks and literally work themselves to death. Workers born in the fall might live several months through the winter, keeping the colony alive by huddling in a large mass or ball, using their body heat to keep the queen and other workers alive. Honeybees store honey and pollen, which they make into "bee bread," for use all winter when they cannot go outside to gather food.
Honeybees face pests and disease, which have been troublesome for centuries. However, stronger varieties of mites and parasites have been a greater threat to colonies both in the wild and those tended by beekeepers.These mites and the diseases resulting from them were not issues for honeybees in the United States until the 1980s. The mites have pretty well eliminated the colonies in the wild and decimated the colonies in apiaries. Mites have to be managed and controlled to keep bees healthy and alive. Aggressive use of some miticides and other chemicals has caused some additional problems for honeybees because mites have become resistant to treatment.Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a relatively recent phenomenon, has killed thousands of colonies, and we still don't know the cause. There are a lot of theories, and new techniques of colony management might be helping honeybees, but research continues because we don't yet understand this phenomenon.Other issues facing honeybees include loss of habitat, loss of forage and threat from chemicals. Trees are being cut down for development, so natural habitat is being reduced. New techniques of agriculture, which eliminate fencerows containing many wild flowers utilized by honeybees, reduces forage. Monoculture of specific crops has reduced their food supply.These comments aren't meant to criticize farmers. The nature of agriculture today has changed, and farmers have to make a living. But there is less forage. And we are learning the residual nature of some chemicals, which stay in the environment for longer periods of time, seems to be impacting honeybee health.
There are minor things you can do to help and larger steps you can take to assist honeybees.A large step is to become a beekeeper. Up until this year, many jurisdictions restricted the areas in which honeybees can be kept, but people are beginning to understand that we need honeybees and that honeybees and people can coexist nicely with a little boundary space.If you want to become a beekeeper, there are a lot of beginner books available, and beekeepers will help you get started. Maybe you just want a colony in your yard to pollinate your garden and the flowers in your area. That is doable with a little research and knowledge. But there are other things you can do.Honeybees need water, so keep a clean birdbath in your yard. Be sure it is not too deep or has something honeybees can land on to sip water to take back to the hive. Honeybees are very talented, but they don't swim well, so have some blocks of wood or gravel for them to land on.You can start a pollinator garden. This will benefit not only honeybees but also butterflies and other pollinators. It will beautify your yard, and you know you are doing something for nature, which can be a nice feeling.Dandelions are a great source of early forage for honeybees, so while some of your neighbors might not appreciate dandelions in your yard, consider leaving them and other flowering plants. If you are going to remove plants, give serious thought to what kind of sprays you use. There is a need for sprays and control, but please follow the directions very carefully — for everyone's sake, including following the directions on disposal. Consider trying some organic ways to control the weeds. Ask your local garden center for suggestions.Lastly, something we didn't cover is swarming. Detailed information on how honeybees expand their population might be a future article. However, honeybees swarm because the space housing the colony wasn't sufficient to house the population, so the mature queen and a large number of workers "decide" to leave.If you see a swarm in your yard, please leave it alone. Honeybees will not settle for long in your favorite lilac bush or shrubbery. They might stay there for a day or two, but they are looking for a new home that emulates a dark hollow place in a tree, and unlike the familiar football-shaped nests of hornets, honeybees cannot live outside a structure because they need walls to anchor honeycomb.So, if you see a swarm, take a few pictures if you wish, and don't let anyone bother the swarm because the bees are carrying honey and are fairly docile at that time. They will eventually move to a hollow tree or a beekeeper's hive. Call local law enforcement, garden supply stores or farm stands to get the phone number of a local beekeeper. We are always glad to come and pick up swarms and move them into an empty hive.I hope I have piqued your interest on honeybees. Honeybees can make it on their own, but the partnership between humans and honeybees has gone on for centuries and will hopefully be preserved. So consider what you might do, first because you want to do something in your yard or area, but also because, just maybe, you are helping one of nature's most miraculous creatures keep food on your table,Can we exist without honeybees? Maybe, but I sure don't want to contemplate a world without them. Do you?<b><i>Lance Shaeffer is a Butler County Master Gardener and a beekeeper.</i></b>
