Tidewater Beekeepers Association

The Buzz About Bees

VA man tries to save 90,000 honeybees

Published : Sunday, 13 Mar 2011, 12:58 PM EDT

BURNT CHIMNEY, Va. (AP) - Sandy Jenner says there's nothing her husband, Jeff, can't make, from homemade pasta to semiconductor frames to a gabled chicken coop on wheels.

The 52-year-old is currently in the sixth year of a (hopefully) seven-year project in which he's constructing a Victorian Queen Anne starter castle -- a turreted, 5,000-square-foot behemoth with radiant floor heating, cathedral ceilings and multiple balconies looking out on the splendor of Cahas Mountain. The handcrafted house plays an important role in this story because it was the three-story scaffolding fastened onto it that allowed for Jeff Jenner's latest endeavor: saving 90,000 honeybees, including one very important queen bee.

Specifically, he removed some 8 pounds of wild bees from a dead tree in Roanoke's Old Southwest and relocated them safely to his do-it-yourself haven in Franklin County, an 81-acre retreat featuring gardens, a greenhouse, heirloom chickens, three German shepherds, a dozen beehives and a rooster named Swearinger.

The bee transfer created something of a spectacle in the Elm Avenue yard where the bees had set up shop in an oak tree at least three years earlier. Jenner scaled the scaffolding 18 feet in the air and vacuumed out the bees.

By the project's end, he counted 35 bee stings, mainly on his hands. (He didn't wear gloves because their bulk could have harmed the bees, he said, and the combs were easier to manipulate without gloves.)

The goal of the project was to help protect the regional bee population from the Varroa mite, one of the chief threats facing the world's declining honeybee population. The Old Southwest bees -- one of just two thriving wild-bee colonies Jenner is aware of in the region -- have proven themselves resistant to the parasite.

By relocating them to his Turkey Ridge Farm, where he breeds queen bees and sells them locally, Jenner wants to strengthen the local bee population and thereby the region's ability to grow local food. "The queen was the main goal," he said. "No one has been treating her or coddling her, and yet this hive has somehow managed to survive on its own."

The Jenners are semiretired, having sold the metal fabrication shop they owned in Gilroy, Calif., where they created frames for Silicon Valley semiconductors. After they relocated to Franklin County in 2003, Sandy began planting a 70-tree fruit orchard. But after five seasons the trees still refused to produce fruit.

So she signed both herself and Jeff up for a beekeeping class, hoping the bees would nudge the trees to fruit. And did they: After the first year with bees, she had to prune back more than half the branches because her trees were so overloaded with apples, peaches, pears and nectarines.

Jeff Jenner teaches beekeeping himself now, in Lynchburg and Moneta, and guest lectures in area schools. "The bees sucked me in," he said.

"The way everything works together as a society, and everyone has his own job function that evolves depending on the needs of the colony -- I fell in love with it."

He's not the only one. More than 4,000 Virginians keep bees, with hobbyist beekeeper associations scattered throughout the region.

The renaissance has been spurred by a renewed interest in local food and gardening -- a good thing, considering that honeybee losses have numbered an average of 30 percent in each of the past 10 years, said Rick Fell, a Virginia Tech entomologist who runs the university's apiculture program.

Honeybees have fallen victim to mites and other parasites, to pesticides and drought. Two decades ago, Virginia had 150,000 bee colonies, about half of them wild. The state now has 40,000, the majority of them managed.

"Honeybees are such important pollinators," Fell said. "If you look at contributions of the honeybee to U.S. agriculture, they're worth $15 billion a year in crop pollination."

It's said that one-third of the American diet consists of foods that are tied to the work of bee-pollinated plants.

New members are showing up regularly for the monthly meetings of the Blue Ridge Beekeepers Association, according to Ron Hanawalt, secretary/treasurer of the group. Newbie beekeepers include an increasing number of people from Roanoke's urban neighborhoods.

"The cities are often a little better than the countryside for beekeeping because of all the ornamental flowers that people plant, and some of the street trees are good too," he said. Hanawalt recommends people take a course and check their locality's zoning regulations before undertaking managing a hive of their own.

A beekeeper since 1976, Hanawalt himself has 200 colonies of bees that he manages on 10 farms -- for a total of 7 million bees.

"Since the bees forage for maybe two miles from home, the few hives someone has in their back yard can actually be reaching out over a pretty good area," he said. "We're glad to see there are a lot more sympathetic souls who appreciate the need for honeybees."

The Importance of Honey Bee Health

By Deirdre Imus

Published February 07, 2011

| FoxNews.com

Most people don’t realize that the beekeeping industry is responsible for one-third of the food we eat.

In the past six years however, the annual die-off of those little pollinating insects responsible for fertilizing plants – a process essential for maintaining our food supply – has become increasingly dramatic. It is a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD).

The consequence of colony collapse can be economically significant as well. Without a thriving bee population produce prices would skyrocket and the food industry could lose billions of dollars. It is for this reason that mounting reports of CCD has beekeepers, naturalists and government scientists concerned.

There have been a number of possible explanations for CCD including urbanization, disease, water pollution and parasitic mites.

Many researchers and beekeepers however, now suspect the introduction of systemic neonicotinoid pesticides as a possible catalyst for the vanishing bees.

Initially introduced to food production in 1994, naonicotinoid pesticides are absorbed into every part of a plant, including the roots, stems, leaves and pollen. When bees pollinate, they carry the pesticide chemicals back to their hives.

Although there has always be concerns about the possible harmful effects and residues left by these chemicals, clothianidin, manufactured and marketed by chemical giant Bayer CropScience in 2003, is considered highly toxic and now suspected as the agent responsible for the demise of honey bee hives around the world.

Prior to its registration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) expressed concerns about clothianidin’s effect on bee populations and suggested the chemical include a label warning that “this compound is toxic to honey bees. ”

In spite of the agency’s reservations, the EPA agreed to a conditional registration of clothianidin.

Last December, the Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA) joined other environmentalists and beekeepers in calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue a stop-use order for the neonicotinoid pesticide clothianidin.

This action was in response to the disclosure of an internal memo describing a two-year-old study by researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory and Penn State University. The yet to be published study found that extremely low “microscopic” concentrations of clothianidin, capable of weakening honey bees and thus making them vulnerable to death.

In the letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, the groups cited the memo in which the agency’s own scientists questioned the validity of a scientific support study used to justify the registration of the pesticide and asked Jackson to “exercise the Agency’s emergency powers to take the pesticide off the market.”

In spite of the agency’s reservations, the EPA agreed to a conditional registration of clothianidin.

Pesticides are meant to kill pests. So it should come as no great surprise that they would kill bees.

Who knows what effect these supposedly “harmless” small amounts have when consumed every day for 20, 30, 40, 50 years? The facts are still clear that if bees become extinct we will have a severe collapse in our food chain.

Honeybees in Virginia are disappearing at an alarming rate.

According to Target Health, Inc. approximately 90 percent of the wild bee population in North America has died out and percentages are close to that in European bee colonies. The disappearance of honeybees has been largely attributed to a syndrome called colony collapse disorder, which is characterized by the disappearance of worker bees from a hive. Since 2004, beekeepers throughout North America have been reporting the disappearance of entire colonies while leaving behind their brood (immature bees). Bees normally do not abandon a hive until the brood has all hatched. In many hives, there are an insufficient number of worker bees to maintain the brood.

The cause or causes of the syndrome is not yet fully understood, however, many beekeepers and entomologists attribute the problem to factors such as disease, parasites, environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition, pesticides and genetically modified crops. Many researchers believe a virus called Israel Acute Paralysis Virus, which causes acute paralysis of bees, is a strong possible culprit in colony collapse disorder. A fungus known as Nosema apis is also a possibility. This parasite interferes with the digestion of pollen, which honeybees collect and bring to the hive. Several pathogens (diseases), such as Isarael Acute Paralysis virus and parasites, such as Nosema apis, were introduced into the Unites States by infected honeybees, honey or bees wax from Asia and other areas. Pesticide usage is also considered a cause, with nicotine-based pesticides believed to be a probable contributing factor

Luring Varroa Mites To Their Doom

July 13, 2009

In nature, Varroa mites rely on natural chemical attractants called semiochemicals to locate and then feed on the bloodlike hemolymph of both adult honey bees and their brood.

At the Agricultural Research Service's Chemistry Research Unit in Gainesville, research leader Peter Teal and colleagues are testing a bait-and-kill approach using sticky boards and semiochemicals. In tests, 35 to 50% of mites have found the lures more attractive than actual bees and have dropped off the bees to become trapped on the sticky boards. 60% of free-roaming mites prefer the lure to the bees.

The researchers hope ARS's patenting of the Varroa attractants will encourage an industrial partner to develop the technology further for use by beekeepers as both a monitoring tool and an alternative to chemical controls.

Click here to read more about the research at the USDA's website.