In 2010
the USDA uncapped their figures: 2009 yielded the lowest recorded U.S.
honey crop ever. EVER. What is happening to the bees?
The bees certainly seem to be going through turbulent changes right
along with the rest of the world. Will the honeybee adjust and
survive?
You
can blame some of the low honey crop that year on the weather.
Mother Nature is not always in sync with the bees. Sometimes she
brings rain when the bees need clear, dry skies. My beekeeping
husband moans when the spring showers, that I love to immerse in, flow
through just as an important nectar crop is ready. The bees don’t
have umbrellas and cannot work in the rain. Yet, a lack of moisture
is not good for them either. If the pollen bearing trees and plants
go through a drought one year it can affect how much nectar is
produced for the bees to harvest the following year.
A
grand dance of interconnections is continuously going on, of which we
are also a part. Just as nature is not always in sync with the bees,
neither is human kind. If we spray our trees and plants with
herbicides, pesticides and fungicides and insist on maintaining plain grass
lawns, lacking in plant diversity, the bees suffer.
Of
course everyone has heard about the mysterious, disappearing bee
phenomena named Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). They say that
recently more than one out of three bee colonies have died due to CCD
nationwide. Ironically, we have one thing for which to thank CCD.
CCD has brought an awareness of the honeybee to the general
population. Before CCD arrived on the scene most people didn’t want
to have any thing to do with any kind of bee. All flying insects were
simply swatted, sprayed or squashed. Now people have become aware of
the unique role of the honeybee and are learning about the other bees
also such as, native pollinators, carpenter bees and the friendly
bumblebee.
Setting up at market selling honey, we have had a large increase
during the last few years in the number of people that inquire about
the welfare of our bees. Today’s crowd is honeybee savvy. Beekeeping
has become more highly esteemed and the job of being a beekeeper has
been elevated. Now, with new awareness, people try to locate
beekeepers to extract honeybee colonies out of structures where they
would have blindly sprayed before. People have become interested in
the survival of the honeybee and we are linking the fate of an insect
with our own future. We are seeing that we are all connected, you, me
and even the bees. People are coming together for a common cause, to
save the honeybee.
Nobody said that it was going to be easy. Apiculture - better known
as beekeeping - is a gamble, it always has been. Like any type of
farming, to be a beekeeper means that one takes chances with the
weather, seasons and pestilence. When all else fails, you hope that
luck is mostly on your side. At our homestead in southeastern Ohio we
have not had a real productive honey crop in quite a few years. We
ran out of honey to sell before Christmas last year leaving our
faithful customers with empty honey jars.
