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ENLARGE
A hefty black spider hidden inside the lid of one of Scott Doyle’s bee boxes scrambled away from the beekeeper’s prying paint scraper.
It tried to run but had nowhere to hide, and Doyle raked it off onto the ground with a flick of his wrist.
“Everybody lives off honeybees,” he said, with a touch of exasperation.
Moving around the box on a recent afternoon to inspect the combs nestled inside, Doyle studied the busy hive and decided this one wasn’t yet ready for honey production.
Doyle and a visitor stepped carefully, so as not to alert the sentinel bees standing guard outside their hives, ready to send warning of an intruder. Doyle didn’t have a smoker-box with him, which beekeepers use to keep the insects tranquil. But he promised his bees were well-behaved.
Doyle, the Larimer County clerk and recorder, is a busy man no matter the season, but this year is exceptionally full as he prepares for what many people believe might be the biggest election in history.
Still, Doyle makes time for his bees.
“It allows me that solitude that a job like this doesn’t really allow you,” he said.
“Did you know bees hold elections?” he added with enthusiasm, before launching into what sounds more like a bee coup d’etat, when a colony replaces its queen.
Doyle is one of several people in Northern Colorado who became enthusiastic about honeybees after learning about colony collapse disorder, which has resulted in the loss of millions of bee colonies since 2006, including a 31 percent decline in American colonies last year.
He talked about it with a county employee who works in the motor vehicle department and is a beekeeper.
“I thought, ‘Maybe I ought to be doing this. They’re in trouble, let’s see if we can help ‘em out a little bit,’” he said.
Just last week, Congress heard about the issue from farmers, beekeepers, researchers and even ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs. The House horticulture and organic agriculture subcommittee’s hearing was only the second of its kind in Washington.
Despite their monumental importance—bees pollinate about one-third of what we eat—the troubled honeybees are surprisingly short of national advocates. There is no Angelina Jolie for bees.
But on a more modest level, bee ambassadors like Doyle are doing all they can to help.
A low, vibrating hum permeates the air around Doyle’s large backyard not far from Terry Lake, north of Fort Collins. The glint of flying bees is visible in the midday sun, but it’s nothing compared to the scene at sunset, Doyle said, when the bees’ wings shimmer in the dwindling light.
Doyle has built enough boxes for eight hives—which can contain between 10,000 and 60,000 individual bees—and even constructed a bee vacuum in order to capture swarms, which happen during spring when a healthy hive reproduces itself, without hurting the bees.
He has learned all he could from a class offered by the Northern Colorado Beekeepers’ Association and from his mentor, Kris Holthaus, who could be called the queen of bees. Holthaus rears queens and Doyle refers to her as “the doctor.”
This is his second season as a beekeeper, but so far his labor hasn’t borne any fruit.
“I’ve got $1,500 tied up in these stupid bees and don’t have any honey yet,” he said.
Doyle’s exasperation is feigned; his fondness for his fuzzy insects is evident. He said it breaks his heart when someone destroys a swarm, which is actually a sign of a healthy bee colony. Many people confuse them with predatory wasps, from which bees evolved millions of years ago. But wasps are aggressive where honeybees are mild-mannered.
And Doyle, of all people, knows that honeybees are anything but stupid.
The lives of bees are fascinatingly complicated. More than 10,000 species are known, but only a handful produce honey, most importantly apis mellifera, or the western honeybee.
All the worker bees are sterile females, and males only exist for mating. When it’s time to mate, the drones hang out not far from the hive and the queen flies to them to mate, killing the drone after the job is done.
“Maybe it has something to do with remote controls,” Doyle joked.
The queen will mate several times, until her fertilization sac is full. At the end of summer, the worker bees will systematically kill all the males and cultivate a new group.
Aside from mating, or if the queen leaves later in her life to start a new colony with a swarm, she will spend most of her days without ever leaving her hive. A queen bee can lay thousands of eggs per day, and is able to choose her offspring’s sex. Nurse bees feed the larvae, which take about two weeks to grow into fully fledged bees.
A queen’s subjects can choose to nurse a new queen cell, feeding it “royal jelly,” and stage bee regicide, murdering an old or unproductive queen in favor of a replacement.
Workers follow a hierarchy and have specific jobs. Newborn bees start out as custodians and move up to nurses and construction workers, before collecting pollen and nectar from older bees. There are also guard bees, which send an alarm pheromone to alert the hive to an attack, and morticians that take care of dead bees.
By about three weeks of age, worker bees become full-time foragers.
Bees communicate food locations through a complicated dance. Doyle said he’s seen it but can’t fully describe it—there’s a “waggle” dance, wherein bees move in a complicated waltz-like wag, and a circular dance. Each time, the other bees know exactly how to find the new food source.
All of this is interesting and unusual, but it is far from the main reason why people should worry about the disappearance of honeybees.
And worry they should.
As Doyle and other Northern Colorado apiculturists say, bees are key to humankind.
There’s an apocryphal quote attributed to Albert Einstein that if honeybees disappear, the human race will follow in four years.
It might not be quite that bad, but it’s true that humans are highly dependent on bees; modern agriculture has evolved to rely on them.
Beth Conrey, president of the Northern Colorado Beekeepers’ Association, said one-third of our food depends on insect pollinators like apis mellifera, except un-scrumptious staples like rice, barley and corn.
“Anything with color,” she said. “Trees, fruit, all your nuts, all melons, citrus, all your cucumbers and such, are pollinated by bees.”
Doyle’s bees have also made aesthetic impacts in his neighborhood, where flowers, shrubs and Russian olive trees are thriving thanks to his bees’ hard work.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the bee, what they do with pollinating, that’s more important than the honey to our planet. That’s clear to me now,” he said.
Even Haagen-Dazs is sufficiently worried about bee-pollinated ingredients—think strawberries, almonds and cherries—that it has invested $250,000 in bee-related university research. The company set up a Web site, helpthehoneybees.com, where visitors can learn the importance of bees to their favorite flavors.
But other corporations and agribusinesses have been slow to sound the alarm. Beekeepers, however, have been beating the drum since fall 2006, when commercial beekeepers started losing hives by the thousands.
The PBS series Nature tackled the subject last fall; in that special, one biologist referred to honeybees as a “keystone species.” If bees disappeared, most flowering plants, which have evolved along with their pollinators, would have no way to reproduce. That’s why colony collapse disorder is such a problem.
“Disorder” is somewhat of a misnomer, because biologists are having a hard time nailing down just what is killing the bees. The insects are simply disappearing, not even leaving bodies behind.
“It would be nice if we had a rifle, and one thing would cause that disorder, but it’s not like that. It’s a shotgun,” Conrey said. “You have several things that have combined to reach a threshold that the insect can no longer sustain.”
When entomologists started examining the dead bees they could find, they discovered the bees had just about everything wrong with them. A paralysis virus is closely associated with colony collapse, as are several varieties of mites and other bee-attacking parasites. But no one has been able to explain the sudden and almost complete disappearances—all that remain is a queen, honey, pollen and some larvae.
Doyle theorizes that the disappearances are related to something in a bee’s internal wiring that prompts it to leave its hive when it knows it’s ill.
Conrey added another explanation: a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Just like it sounds, they’re a synthetic form of nicotine, used in agricultural production and in seed coatings. The substances are known to disorient insects, a problem for honeybees dependent on their keen sense of direction.
“There is a suspicion that that’s a cause,” Conrey said. “What we have is murder without the bodies, because nobody is getting home.”
The problem is not limited to the United States; bee colonies are disappearing as far away as Taiwan, Brazil and Germany. Wild bees are even worse off—Conrey said about 90 percent of Colorado’s wild bee population has disappeared since the mid-1980s.
The farm bill recently approved over President Bush’s veto included $20 million for bee research, but it’s not guaranteed money.
At the same time, crops like California almonds are reaching all-time yields, but those numbers will only slide backward if there are not enough bees to pollinate them.
Meanwhile, beekeepers like Doyle are plugging away, working to keep their hives healthy and in the public’s mind.
“Why do we do this?” he wondered, walking around his bee boxes, not posing a question so much as making a philosophical statement. “Is it for the honey, or the greater good of mankind?”
Of course, he already knew the answer.
It tried to run but had nowhere to hide, and Doyle raked it off onto the ground with a flick of his wrist.
“Everybody lives off honeybees,” he said, with a touch of exasperation.
Moving around the box on a recent afternoon to inspect the combs nestled inside, Doyle studied the busy hive and decided this one wasn’t yet ready for honey production.
Doyle and a visitor stepped carefully, so as not to alert the sentinel bees standing guard outside their hives, ready to send warning of an intruder. Doyle didn’t have a smoker-box with him, which beekeepers use to keep the insects tranquil. But he promised his bees were well-behaved.
Doyle, the Larimer County clerk and recorder, is a busy man no matter the season, but this year is exceptionally full as he prepares for what many people believe might be the biggest election in history.
Still, Doyle makes time for his bees.
“It allows me that solitude that a job like this doesn’t really allow you,” he said.
“Did you know bees hold elections?” he added with enthusiasm, before launching into what sounds more like a bee coup d’etat, when a colony replaces its queen.
Doyle is one of several people in Northern Colorado who became enthusiastic about honeybees after learning about colony collapse disorder, which has resulted in the loss of millions of bee colonies since 2006, including a 31 percent decline in American colonies last year.
He talked about it with a county employee who works in the motor vehicle department and is a beekeeper.
“I thought, ‘Maybe I ought to be doing this. They’re in trouble, let’s see if we can help ‘em out a little bit,’” he said.
Just last week, Congress heard about the issue from farmers, beekeepers, researchers and even ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs. The House horticulture and organic agriculture subcommittee’s hearing was only the second of its kind in Washington.
Despite their monumental importance—bees pollinate about one-third of what we eat—the troubled honeybees are surprisingly short of national advocates. There is no Angelina Jolie for bees.
But on a more modest level, bee ambassadors like Doyle are doing all they can to help.
A low, vibrating hum permeates the air around Doyle’s large backyard not far from Terry Lake, north of Fort Collins. The glint of flying bees is visible in the midday sun, but it’s nothing compared to the scene at sunset, Doyle said, when the bees’ wings shimmer in the dwindling light.
Doyle has built enough boxes for eight hives—which can contain between 10,000 and 60,000 individual bees—and even constructed a bee vacuum in order to capture swarms, which happen during spring when a healthy hive reproduces itself, without hurting the bees.
He has learned all he could from a class offered by the Northern Colorado Beekeepers’ Association and from his mentor, Kris Holthaus, who could be called the queen of bees. Holthaus rears queens and Doyle refers to her as “the doctor.”
This is his second season as a beekeeper, but so far his labor hasn’t borne any fruit.
“I’ve got $1,500 tied up in these stupid bees and don’t have any honey yet,” he said.
Doyle’s exasperation is feigned; his fondness for his fuzzy insects is evident. He said it breaks his heart when someone destroys a swarm, which is actually a sign of a healthy bee colony. Many people confuse them with predatory wasps, from which bees evolved millions of years ago. But wasps are aggressive where honeybees are mild-mannered.
And Doyle, of all people, knows that honeybees are anything but stupid.
The lives of bees are fascinatingly complicated. More than 10,000 species are known, but only a handful produce honey, most importantly apis mellifera, or the western honeybee.
All the worker bees are sterile females, and males only exist for mating. When it’s time to mate, the drones hang out not far from the hive and the queen flies to them to mate, killing the drone after the job is done.
“Maybe it has something to do with remote controls,” Doyle joked.
The queen will mate several times, until her fertilization sac is full. At the end of summer, the worker bees will systematically kill all the males and cultivate a new group.
Aside from mating, or if the queen leaves later in her life to start a new colony with a swarm, she will spend most of her days without ever leaving her hive. A queen bee can lay thousands of eggs per day, and is able to choose her offspring’s sex. Nurse bees feed the larvae, which take about two weeks to grow into fully fledged bees.
A queen’s subjects can choose to nurse a new queen cell, feeding it “royal jelly,” and stage bee regicide, murdering an old or unproductive queen in favor of a replacement.
Workers follow a hierarchy and have specific jobs. Newborn bees start out as custodians and move up to nurses and construction workers, before collecting pollen and nectar from older bees. There are also guard bees, which send an alarm pheromone to alert the hive to an attack, and morticians that take care of dead bees.
By about three weeks of age, worker bees become full-time foragers.
Bees communicate food locations through a complicated dance. Doyle said he’s seen it but can’t fully describe it—there’s a “waggle” dance, wherein bees move in a complicated waltz-like wag, and a circular dance. Each time, the other bees know exactly how to find the new food source.
All of this is interesting and unusual, but it is far from the main reason why people should worry about the disappearance of honeybees.
And worry they should.
As Doyle and other Northern Colorado apiculturists say, bees are key to humankind.
There’s an apocryphal quote attributed to Albert Einstein that if honeybees disappear, the human race will follow in four years.
It might not be quite that bad, but it’s true that humans are highly dependent on bees; modern agriculture has evolved to rely on them.
Beth Conrey, president of the Northern Colorado Beekeepers’ Association, said one-third of our food depends on insect pollinators like apis mellifera, except un-scrumptious staples like rice, barley and corn.
“Anything with color,” she said. “Trees, fruit, all your nuts, all melons, citrus, all your cucumbers and such, are pollinated by bees.”
Doyle’s bees have also made aesthetic impacts in his neighborhood, where flowers, shrubs and Russian olive trees are thriving thanks to his bees’ hard work.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the bee, what they do with pollinating, that’s more important than the honey to our planet. That’s clear to me now,” he said.
Even Haagen-Dazs is sufficiently worried about bee-pollinated ingredients—think strawberries, almonds and cherries—that it has invested $250,000 in bee-related university research. The company set up a Web site, helpthehoneybees.com, where visitors can learn the importance of bees to their favorite flavors.
But other corporations and agribusinesses have been slow to sound the alarm. Beekeepers, however, have been beating the drum since fall 2006, when commercial beekeepers started losing hives by the thousands.
The PBS series Nature tackled the subject last fall; in that special, one biologist referred to honeybees as a “keystone species.” If bees disappeared, most flowering plants, which have evolved along with their pollinators, would have no way to reproduce. That’s why colony collapse disorder is such a problem.
“Disorder” is somewhat of a misnomer, because biologists are having a hard time nailing down just what is killing the bees. The insects are simply disappearing, not even leaving bodies behind.
“It would be nice if we had a rifle, and one thing would cause that disorder, but it’s not like that. It’s a shotgun,” Conrey said. “You have several things that have combined to reach a threshold that the insect can no longer sustain.”
When entomologists started examining the dead bees they could find, they discovered the bees had just about everything wrong with them. A paralysis virus is closely associated with colony collapse, as are several varieties of mites and other bee-attacking parasites. But no one has been able to explain the sudden and almost complete disappearances—all that remain is a queen, honey, pollen and some larvae.
Doyle theorizes that the disappearances are related to something in a bee’s internal wiring that prompts it to leave its hive when it knows it’s ill.
Conrey added another explanation: a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Just like it sounds, they’re a synthetic form of nicotine, used in agricultural production and in seed coatings. The substances are known to disorient insects, a problem for honeybees dependent on their keen sense of direction.
“There is a suspicion that that’s a cause,” Conrey said. “What we have is murder without the bodies, because nobody is getting home.”
The problem is not limited to the United States; bee colonies are disappearing as far away as Taiwan, Brazil and Germany. Wild bees are even worse off—Conrey said about 90 percent of Colorado’s wild bee population has disappeared since the mid-1980s.
The farm bill recently approved over President Bush’s veto included $20 million for bee research, but it’s not guaranteed money.
At the same time, crops like California almonds are reaching all-time yields, but those numbers will only slide backward if there are not enough bees to pollinate them.
Meanwhile, beekeepers like Doyle are plugging away, working to keep their hives healthy and in the public’s mind.
“Why do we do this?” he wondered, walking around his bee boxes, not posing a question so much as making a philosophical statement. “Is it for the honey, or the greater good of mankind?”
Of course, he already knew the answer.
