Bee Cause

One of the girls on our lavender.

We have four hives of honeybees this season. In years past, we've had as few as two and as many as ten. But this year it's four, and four is enough.

Life has been hard for the honeybee for a long time. Mites and viruses threaten the hives every year. Now, recently, we've added "Colony Collapse Disorder" to the mix...a mysterious condition in which the beekeeper opens the hive one day and finds the bees gone. Not dead...just gone. There are all sorts of theories as to what causes CCD, but no definitive answer yet. As a slightly-seasoned beekeeper (this is our eleventh year), I've given it my share of thought.  And since I am not a "bee whisperer" (nor do I know one), this is nothing more than my best guess, based on my personal knowledge of the ways of the bees.

I think CCD will eventually be attributed to chemical buildup in the hive. In a healthy hive, worker bees become foragers (looking for nectar) in the last third of their short lives. The first two-thirds of their time is spent in the hive, taking care of the young and keeping the hive clean and comfortable. So, if CCD were some sort of disorienting virus/disease that affects the radar of the bees, it would not explain the sudden, complete, abandonment of the hive because only a third of the hive is flying at any given time. But, what might explain the complete, sudden, abandonment of the hive is chemical residue building up to a point that the bees find it intolerable.

The two main boxes in a hive are called the "hive bodies". This is where most hive activity takes place...the laying of eggs, tending the young, bringing in of nectar and pollen. As a general rule, beekeepers stay out of these boxes when it comes to harvesting honey and/or beeswax. Honey and beeswax are taken from boxes placed on top of the hive bodies…smaller boxes separated from the main hive by a queen excluder, which prevents the queen from laying eggs in these upper boxes.

Over the years, the beeswax in the lower, busy, boxes becomes darkened with use. The impurities in this wax build up with each cycle of life and each cycle of nectar flow…and some of the impurities are most certainly residue from the bees visiting plants that have been chemically treated.

It seems logical to me that, at some point, the bees can’t stand the smell, taste, or feel of it any more, or it disorients the entire hive. They leave and soon die out, either due to starvation or another illness.

For years, we believed the chemical companies when they told us the sprays on our food were harmless. Now we know that’s not true, and we are suffering the consequences of years of exposure. If the exposure is harmful to us, imagine what it might do to a tiny, defenseless honeybee!

So, to test my theory, we eliminated many “old” frames of beeswax in our hives this year. The bees worked hard to build new wax honeycombs this spring and that will mean a significant decrease in the amount of extra honey we can pull off the hives (to create beeswax, the bees gorge themselves on honey, which activates their wax glands…they must eat eight pounds of honey to create just one pound of beeswax!). But the loss in honey this year might just mean robust health for the hive for years to come.

Next year we will replace more old wax and we’ll start a schedule to ensure that, in the future, the wax in the busy hive bodies isn’t allowed to build up to, what might be, a harmful home for the bees.