Show Me the Honey

by Dave Doroghy

  And it goes deeper than communication. Bees have an innate, finely tuned electrical sense. In relation to one another, bees are positively charged and flowers are negatively charged. This means that when bees pollinate, the electrical polarity helps the pollen stick to bees’ hair. The interference we are creating with all of our gadgets and 21st-century device addictions can’t be a welcome addition to the bees’ well-being.

  Unsurprisingly, pesticides are another major suspect in the CCD mystery. Of the wide range of pesticides currently used to eradicate the various pests that love and thrive on monoculture, neonicotinoids have been established as having a strong link to bee decline. Note the word nicotine buried in there. A pesticide with this name is not going to turn out well for bees.

  The same players that brought you GMOs and monoculture have come up with a new class of insecticides chemically related to nicotine. Only these poisons don’t come with a warning for bees written on the sides of flowers, like on the sides of cigarette boxes; there is no surgeon general to warn them. The term neonicotinoids basically means “new nicotine-like insecticides.” Like the nicotine we take in when we smoke, the neonicotinoids act on certain receptors in the nerve synapses of invasive insect pests. Neonicotinoids, which are much more toxic to bugs than they are to animals, birds, or people, have also been linked to greater bee susceptibility to the villainous varroa mite. One of the reasons neonicotinoids are so popular is that they are easy to use—their water solubility allows for easy application into the soil, where they are slurped up by plants. In turn, bees hungry for flower nectar drink up the pesticide. Think of it this way: every time bees go in for a sip of nectar, they have to take a deep drag on a cigarette. See, I told you this one was not going to turn out well for the bees. Since birds rely on bees for some of their food, it is easy to see how this little pest-control cocktail might have a negative chain reaction.

  Studies have shown that although low-level exposure to neonicotinoids does not directly kill bees, the chemical may impair their ability to forage for nectar, learn and remember where flowers are, and find their way home to their hives. Unlike people, who can choose to kick the cigarette habit, bees can’t choose to kick the neonicotinoid habit. They must rely on the decisions that modern farmers and lawmakers—understandably concerned about profits and re-election, respectively—make about spreading more of these pesticides on crops. You can almost hear our bees coughing louder and louder. Fortunately, some countries have passed regulations limiting neonicotinoid use. However, it is not time to rest easy, thinking the problem is solved, because there is often pressure from big agriculture corporations to reduce regulations on pesticides; thus, the way that neonicotinoid use is limited depends on the individual regulations passed. Also, not all countries have limited neonicotinoid use. According to some sources, the theory that neonicotinoids may be a culprit in CCD is even under hot debate. See how complicated it is to try to sort out my poor girls’ fate and my hive’s dead out?

  Many interconnected factors are suspected of contributing to CCD. The final factor is a huge global conundrum: climate change. If temperature fluctuations from a changing climate cause the snowcaps to melt earlier in the year and the flowers to emerge and bloom earlier, it’s not clear if the bees will adjust easily. If the flowers are available early but there are no bees around to pollinate them, it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out there is going to be a problem. To make one pound of honey, bees need to visit about 2 million flowers. If the bees miss the first few weeks of blooming flowers because no one told them spring came early, will they have time to visit more flowers later on to make up for it? Will enough flowers bloom later in the season? And what of the effects of potentially increased drought in some areas?

  Scientists are quickly trying to piece together and predict the exact effects of climate change on bees. Initial signs point to a detrimental conclusion, which comes as no surprise. Oh, and did I mention that climate change could also pose a few problems for mankind as well? Season length, temperature, and available water make up the essential recipe for growing our food crops. I am sure you’ve heard the predictions. Climate change will mess with, and is already messing with, this essential recipe. If I were you, I’d stock up on almonds.

  In the end, after considering all of these bee life hazards, I felt a bit less distraught about my own ineptitude. With so many complex factors, it is impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of my dead out. Was it my poor beekeeping skills or was it some of the contributors to CCD? It was probably a bit of both. The culprits connected to CCD are weakening hives in general; my hive was just a tiny microcosm of a global epidemic.

  After ruminating over the loss of my hive for far too long, I finally came to the acceptance stage of the insect-grieving process. Perhaps it’s not that I am a lousy beekeeper after all; maybe I am just a novice who took up beekeeping a bit too late in life. I thought about my resident bee expert, Axel, as a teenager in the mid 1970s. This was before genetically modified foods, climate change, cellphones, monoculture, and neonicotinoids. It seems we may have circled back to Rachel Carson’s SOS about DDT in her 1962 book, Silent Spring. Here we are again—humans bumbling about and causing problems in Mother Nature’s perfect system. I pictured Axel’s hardy bees long ago in their hives next to bountiful open spaces full of flowers in British Columbia’s West Kootenays, with snow-capped mountains in the background and air so fresh their tiny lungs probably screamed with joy. Axel’s bees were independent and needed little human intervention. I fantasized that if I had been a beekeeper then, I’d probably have so much honey, it would make my float home list to one side.

  My sadness lifted, if only momentarily. But the blues descended again when I pictured poor hobby apiarists setting out to keep bees 50 years from now. Will they struggle to raise sickly, lethargic bees? Will they only be able to raise bees in giant indoor greenhouses? That was when I powered off my cellphone, shut down my Wi-Fi router, turned off the radio, and went to tend to my non-GMO, pesticide-free flowers on my houseboat deck. I gave each plant a generous drink of fresh water to keep it healthy, so that it could offer nectar to whatever living, vibrant bees happened by on a flight down the Fraser River to their foraging grounds.

  Splitsville

  We all face forks in the road. Life is nothing more than a self-directed joyride continuum of decisions large and small. Take that job overseas, go back to university, get married, buy that house, buy that car, bike to Mexico. These are some of the bigger decisions. Return that turquoise sweater, buy a lottery ticket, start a diet, read every book ever written by Ernest Hemingway, make the bed. These are the smaller decisions. The road I’d travelled over the last few years led me to a medium-sized decision: whether or not to continue beekeeping.

  Quite frankly, a big part of me wanted to quit beekeeping. I had some long overseas trips planned that I didn’t want interrupted by having to come home and feed the bees sugar water so they could survive the winter. I was sick and tired of all the money I was pouring into this money pit of a hobby. I had recently purchased a new vaporizer that cost over $150, and my “old” beekeeping suit had become so full of bee-sized holes that I had to invest $150 in a new and improved one. What did I have to show for my toil and trouble? For the money that had flown from my wallet like a queen bee on her sex-crazed mating flight? I had a ghost town of a hive and no honey.

  And one more thing: the novelty of getting stung had worn off. I’d been stung in the face over a dozen times. My ears, nose, throat, and cheeks had ballooned up to disproportionate sizes. In general, not a good look.

  As with many decisions, there was the practical analysis: time and money invested versus satisfaction and fulfillment derived. But the analytical part of decision-making so often becomes crowded with emotions: love, attachment, grief …

  Most of us have experienced the death of a pet—a cat or a dog we loved so much and grew so accustomed to that we are profoundly affected by its passing long after the animal is gone. Th
e ways we process grief after losing a pet are complex and varied, and can sometimes be as intense as losing a family member or friend. Many animal lovers, caring, lifelong pet owners, give this advice: don’t get a new pet too quickly. Give yourself six months to a year to get over the loss, and then, after some time has passed, consider a new pet.

  I reflected on this after losing my bees. Should I replace them? Maybe Mother Nature was trying to tell me that beekeeping wasn’t for me. Maybe she had given me a sign that I should just move on.

  But I had all this expensive beekeeping equipment and fancy protective clothing. My close circle of friends and family were composed of beekeepers, and all the folks I ran into at the grocery store now identified me as Dave the Apiarist. Plus I had the official framed provincial beekeeping certificate. Beekeeping had become a part of my identity; it seemed a shame to quit after I had invested three years of my life in learning apiary skills. I wondered if I could recapture the interest and curiosity I had when Miriam and Len first dropped off the new hive on the back deck of my float home.

  For days, then weeks, post-bee-mortem, I wrestled with the question of whether this hobby was worth pursuing. I seriously considered that it might be time to let go and move on.

  If it was time to let go, then so “bee” it. After all, I had quit or given up on different sports, hobbies, and even animals in the past. It was nothing to be ashamed of; we humans change and grow. Our interests and goals shift. It’s perfectly natural. In my 20s, I was totally into coin collecting and playing racquetball. I invested a significant amount of time, money, and energy into these pastimes, enthusiastically embraced them, and then, for some reason, I just quit. I never looked back, and I don’t regret letting go of either former passion. But my choice to continue keeping bees was not as simple as whether I was “into it” or not. There were deeper emotional nuances.

  Certain past pet traumas were fuelling my bee quandary. Fifty years earlier, my grandmother from New York sent us four turtles in a cardboard box—real turtles, mind you, not the chocolate kind. Manhattan pet stores in the 1960s had adopted a ridiculous trend of painting flowers and other colourful motifs on the shells of small pet turtles in order to create demand. The pet-store owners used indelible oil paint. At the tender age of eight, I learned three useless turtle-shell facts: oil paints contain harmful turtle-killing chemicals, turtle shells are porous and absorb those chemicals into the creature’s bloodstream, and a turtle with a cute yellow daisy painted on its back is a turtle condemned to die within three to six months. That was how long our turtles from Granny lived. During that short period, my sister and I cared diligently for our turtles—we read about them, fussed over them, carefully and regularly fed them, and generally bonded with them.

  In truth, as far as pets go, the turtles weren’t that great. Unlike bees, which fly around like crazy and are fun to watch, the turtles were kind of boring. They moved so slowly we often thought they were dead. Then one day: “Hey, wait a minute. They are dead!” Turtles can have only so much poisonous paint flowing through their tiny turtle hearts before they finally croak. Their death in the name of turtle-shell art pretty much closed the chapter on my sister and me raising reptiles as a hobby. I felt like some of my beekeeping mistakes were as bumbling as painting toxic chemicals on a turtle.

  Eventually, my ruminations led me to a middle ground. Maybe a break was in order. Heeding the advice of pet lovers on grieving, I figured that taking some time between all the bees that had died and acquiring a brand new hive would provide a valuable opportunity to reflect and heal. After a break, I could start with a clean slate. That’s it: a hiatus. But how long of a break should I take? Should I set a time based on the advised six months to a year? Only problem was, that transition formula was for a single pet. I had just lost 10,000 bees; I wouldn’t be emotionally ready to get a new hive for at least 5,000 to 10,000 years. That would mean taking up my limited apiarist skills again sometime between the years 7020 and 12020. Heck, even if by some miracle of biology or physics I was still alive, I would have forgotten everything I’d learned by then; after all, I’d forgotten almost everything I’d learned just a week after taking the bee school exam. What difference would it make anyway? I won’t be around in 7020, and based on the increased rate of CCD, there is a good chance bees won’t be either. And if the bees won’t be around, neither will humans … and, well, you get the picture.

  I decided that if I was going to continue beekeeping, it was best for me to start right away. I needed to quit moping around like a blood-poisoned turtle with a toxic sunflower on its back and roll up my white bee-suit sleeves, take stock of my previous challenges and errors, and refill my empty hive with new buzzing life.

  Where to begin though? How could I make sure I didn’t repeat my mistakes? I don’t ever want to encounter 10,000 brownish-yellow corpses again. Miraculously, I remembered one lecture from bee school focused on certain diseases that remain in wooden hive boxes long after the bees are dead, and this gave me a clear place to begin: my equipment. I recalled that if you don’t take action immediately after a dead out, the lingering diseases will go on to kill any future live bees you introduce to those hive boxes.

  One disease, American foulbrood (AFB), is so deadly, it requires a blowtorch to scorch the inner walls of the hive to rid the wood of a microscopic spore-forming bacterium called Paenibacillus larvae, which can remain active on beekeeping equipment for 70 years. That’s right, 70 years! The rod-shaped AFB spores are minuscule and impossible to spot. In a hive infected with AFB, nurse bees feed the poor unsuspecting, newly hatched bee larvae the heavenly brood honey, but it is contaminated with Paenibacillus. The babies die within a few days. The bodies of the baby bees decompose into a telltale ropy, smelly (hence the name foulbrood) composition, releasing millions and millions more Paenibacillus spores. More babies eat more contaminated honey, the bees out foraging spread the spores, and so on. According to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs, all it takes to infect a one-hour-old larva is one spore. And it takes only 35 spores to infect a day-old larva.

  One way of knowing if you have American foulbrood is by checking to see if the dried, dead larvae have formed hard, brittle, dark scales along the lower walls of each wax cell; these are the remains of what once had promised to become hard-working honeybees. So I pulled out my old frames and inspected the empty cells for signs of foulbrood. I couldn’t spot any scales, which was a relief, especially since each scale can contain up to 2.5 billion spores. I was lucky; it was likely I would have accidentally set my float home aflame trying to scorch the bee boxes.

  In all probability, my bees, weakened by those dastardly bloodsucking varroa destructor mites, had died of chalkbrood or nosema. I couldn’t really remember the difference between those two maladies. It had been almost a year since the bee course. But, luckily, I did remember the instructor mentioning a cool thing called an Iotron electron beam sterilizer that would zap chalkbrood and nosema cells and kill all the microscopic pests that might inhabit your frames, boxes, and beekeeping equipment. I liked the name of the machine; it sounded like something out of Star Trek. I figured everything about beekeeping up until now had been so low tech, it would be fun to experience something high tech for a change. If I was going to do this again, I was going to do it right. Beam me up, Scotty!

  As luck would have it, Canada’s largest Iotron electron beam sterilizer is located in a suburb of Vancouver called Port Coquitlam, an hour’s drive from the float home. So one Saturday morning I loaded my contaminated hive into the van and made a beeline to the sanitation station. Arriving in the massive parking lot full of 18-wheelers, I extracted my three-box hive with the 30 dirty frames and, with my rusty beekeeping tool in hand, walked toward one of the loading docks of a huge grey warehouse about the size of three Costcos. I rang the bell, feeling a bit like Dorothy ringing the bell at the entrance to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. Shortly afterward, a bald guy in a white lab coat, eerily reminiscent o
f the Wizard, answered. I fully expected him to say, “Go away!” After seeing my hive boxes, he understood I was legit, smiled, and let me in.

  The electron beam accelerator was massive, about as large as a mid-sized commercial airliner. The 15-foot-high, weird-looking machine had a big black rubber conveyor belt running smack dab through the middle of it. I saw huge boxcars of stuff being piled onto the conveyor belt and watched forklifts loaded with pallets of rocks racing around the warehouse. Taking it all in, I realized how small my paltry, quick-fix beehive cleansing job was in the scheme of things here; maybe I should have stayed home and stuck my hive boxes in the microwave.

  I was truly interested in just what the hell this machine did and its commercial applications. The guy in the lab coat turned out to be friendly, but he kept on looking at his wristwatch as if he were a bit pressed for time. I didn’t take the hint. I broke the ice by asking if he had many beekeepers showing up. He looked askance at my zany, colourfully painted hive boxes and replied, “Beehive sterilization represents less than 1 percent of our business. It’s mainly commercial beekeepers that ship thousands of hives at a time down here from all across Western Canada. Some bee clubs will pool orders from their members and ship hundreds of hives once or twice a year.” He closed by letting out a little chuckle. “We rarely get someone like you showing up alone with just one hive.” I felt so stupid standing there with my single puny hive. Yet it gave me pause that thousands of diseased hives ran through the machine each year; it put my one hive’s demise in perspective.