Longtime local journalist Bill Radford and his wife, Margaret, live on 5 acres in the Falcon area with chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, a flock of parakeets, goats and two horses. Contact Bill at billradford3@gmail.com.
Bee forewarned: no honeybees, no food
By Bill Radford
Once again, it was time to grieve as beekeepers.
In January, my wife, Margaret, opened one of our two hives to find all the bees dead. Just weeks before, everything had seemed fine. The loss followed a glorious summer where our bees had feasted on a “superbloom” of prairie coreopsis and produced honey in an amount we never would have dreamed of.
And now the bees were gone — similar to the losses we had suffered in previous winters. There were still bees in the other hive, but at a drastically reduced number, and it would not be long before they were all gone, too.
We took the first hive and a collection of dead bees to Rocky Mountain Bee Supply, just west of downtown Colorado Springs, where Leonard Rickerman — who owns the business with his wife, Dolly — performed an autopsy of sorts.
In March, entomologists at Washington State University warned that commercial honeybee colony losses in the U.S. could reach up to 70% this year; that’s up from annual losses of 40% to 50% over the past decade.
His conclusion? The bees had not died from an infestation of varroa mites, the No. 1 threat to honeybees. It hadn’t been cold enough at the time for temperatures to have been a factor. And they had plenty to eat. They had died in a “sudden, catastrophic event,” but what that event was wasn’t clear. Since the hive had been treated for mites just days before our grim discovery, we could only conclude that something had gone wrong and the treatment was at fault.
Whatever the cause, we’re not alone in our loss. In March, entomologists at Washington State University warned that commercial honeybee colony losses in the U.S. could reach up to 70% this year; that’s up from annual losses of 40% to 50% over the past decade.
“Losses have been increasing steadily,” said Priya Chakrabarti Basu, an assistant professor of pollinator health and apiculture at WSU, in a news release. She pointed to “a combination of stressors, including nutrition deficiencies, mite infestations, viral diseases and possible pesticide exposure during the previous pollinating season.”
Why should you care? As the U.S. Department of Agriculture notes, honeybees are a critical link in agricultural production. Honeybees, the agency states, pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year, including more than 130 types of fruits, nuts and vegetables. Dolly cites estimates that one out of every three bites of food we eat is made possible by honeybees and other pollinators.
“This affects everyone,” she says.
Leonard and Dolly have been keeping track of what some have called “catastrophic losses” in honeybees in California. “What’s really odd,” Leonard says, “is that it’s not across the board.” One commercial beekeeper might suffer devastating losses, he said, while one a few miles away is faring OK.
“I don’t have any answers,” Leonard says. “We’re watching as close as we can.”
The good news? “Everyone we work with on getting our bees, they’re all operating at 100%,” Leonard says. “They’re all on solid ground, so we’ll be able to take care of all of our fellow beekeepers.”
Those “fellow beekeepers” include me and Margaret as we continue to move forward despite our latest losses, which brings us to “Bee Day,” the equivalent of Super Bowl Sunday for Rocky Mountain Supply. On the last Saturday of April, we and other beekeepers — some newbies, others like us who had to replenish our supply of bees — gathered at the store to get new bees, delivered in a climate-controlled, 18-wheeler truck that drove straight through from Northern California.
In all, about 1,200 packages of bees were distributed. Each 3-pound package contains 8,000 to 10,000 bees: a mere 12 million bees or so.
Hopefully, they’ve all found a good home. We Colorado beekeepers have our share of challenges, though.
“We have a short season,” Dolly says, a limited time when flowers are blooming and food is available for the bees. “That short season really requires us to be on our A game as far as keeping our bees healthy, keeping them fed, keeping them treated for mites, things like that. We don’t have the luxury of time that people in warmer climates have.”
Life out here on the prairie offers additional challenges as well. Apart from last summer’s superbloom, we worry there’s not enough nectar and pollen out here for bees to feast on. We plant flowers for the bees, but they don’t bloom until later in the season. The relentless winds in spring and fall don’t help either; strong winds can limit foraging.
All that doesn’t keep us and others from still trying to nurture the bees. Leonard has seen an increased interest in beekeeping since the pandemic as part of an overall “urban homesteading” trend. ”People are going back to their roots, having a garden, having a beehive, having chickens. We’re seeing a big surge in that.”
While backyard beekeepers don’t deal with the same numbers as commercial ones, there’s no us vs. them, Leonard says.
“We’re all in the same boat. We’re all trying to be good stewards of the honeybee.”
On April 26, a climate controlled 18-wheeler that came directly from Northern California delivered an abundance of bees to Rocky Mountain Supply, where beekeepers anxiously awaited their new bees so they could replenish their bee population.
Bees await their new hives. Honeybees are vital to the food industry; they polinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year, including more than 130 types of fruits, nuts and vegetables. Photos by Bill Radford
