Back in ye Olden days beekeepers had it made, at least from my perspective. Sure their life expectancy was about 36 and they did not have air conditioning but I can imagine they had an easier time managing their honeybees. The golden age would probably have been just prior to the 1980’s before the Varroa mites were first introduced into the states. Yes, there still were the tracheal mites but at least honeybees existed, such as the Buckfast variety, that could tolerate them. Most of the beekeepers alive prior to the 20th century did not have to deal with the myriad of chemicals to treat all of these internal hive beasties.
Outside of the hive was a different matter. In the 50’s through the early 70’s DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethan) was being sprinkled around like water along with a hoast of other chemicals to kill the pests of agriculture. Today one almost needs a PHD to understand the molecular makeup of the chemicals being used inside and outside of their hives. As of 2009, beekeepers have the following options on their menu:
What does this mean for the beekeeper? From my perspective it looks like a recipe for disaster. These chemicals are nothing but temporary solutions to a problem that requires some long term readjustments. The bees that exist now are more dependant on human beings than ever before. This can be seen with the population of “feral” bees in the United States. Feral bees are really nothing more than kept bees that have swarmed out into the wild. With the coming of the Varroa mite, feral populations have crashed. This can also be seen in our bee yards too where the Varroa mite, among other beasties, have decimated our hives. These pests weaken our bees and allow them to succumb to other diseases ending with the eventual collapse of the hive.
What is our solution? Pump our hives full of toxic chemicals instead of relying on natural selection to do the job for us. As a result we have a weaker bee population that will never be able to propagate themselves on their own and survive. I am not against the use of science per se to help fix our problems. I for one am a living example of better living through chemicals with my Symbiocort Asthma steroid. I am just trying to make the point that the more we rely on quick fixes to solve our problems the harder it is going to be to dig ourselves out of this expanding trench. The more we use these chemicals the weaker the colonies will become over the long term.
How to fix this problem? We must rely on Friedrich Nietzsche’s sage advice when he said “That which does not kill you makes you stronger.” We need to let the honeybees resolve the issues affecting them using biology rather than chemistry. Nature has the wonderful ability of adapting to new circumstances when given the chance. I can already hear what many people are saying right now at their keyboards. How can a commercial honey producer just let honeybees exist on their own without the use of chemicals to protect them? It would be financial suicide!
Have you ever heard of SETI? It stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI has millions of signals that they must filter through and process. For any one computer, even a CRAY, it would take endless amounts of hours considering there are always new signals to process. So the scientists at SETI came up with a neat solution. They made this processing software available to anyone who wanted to download it onto their computer. The user would install the program and let it run in the background. The program automatically downloads a signal from the website. It then might take 2 hours to process the single signal on the users PC. Once done, it uploads the processed signal back to the server and downloads another one. Big deal you might say, 12 signals out of millions are processed a day. Whoopdeedoo. But it is not just one user, there are hundreds of thousands of users running this program on their computer. By this collective effort, massive amounts of processing can be done through machines 1/100000 as powerful as a CRAY. This allows the researchers to avoid the expense of purchasing a large number of super computers to process signals.
How does this relate to beekeeping? Well the commercial beekeepers are the CRAY computers of the world and the hobbyist, the small laptop PC. If a large group of volunteer hobbyists could agree to stop using all of theses chemicals and just let the bees deal with these issues on their own, for good or ill, eventually a honeybee might appear that is resistant to a particular issue. That honeybee would then have an advantage over the other honeybees and more likely be able to propagate successfully. I am not sure what scale of effort or time would be needed to do this. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years possibly to yield a single mutation trait that could benefit the species. However, with hundreds of thousands of colonies, maybe this long time span could be reduced to only a decade. I am not an evolutionary biologist so I can not say for sure. Despite this, I see three benefits to doing something like this.
1. The honey you harvest will be as organic as honey can be. Although you cannot control the pollution honeybees get into when looking for resources you can at least know what you are putting into the hive.
2. You are taking part in a process to help build a better bee for the future. One that does not need to rely on human efforts to survive.
3. Commercial beekeepers could continue using traditional management practices as they provide pollination and honey to the general public as the volunteers put their bees on the line.
The downside to the hobbyist is that it could get expensive continually replacing hives year after year with new packages, little honey yield, and the allowing of bees to become weaker in the short term. This last negative could really be bad especially if the stress on the hive, from not using chemicals, allows the bees to develop American Foul Brood. AFB is a bacterial disease easily passed from one colony to another in the bee yard through spores. Often the hive has to be burned to prevent the spread.
These are just all ideas. Food for thought. I would like to know what bee researchers think of this kind of possibility.
