By Ariana Mallery
Cherie Sintes-Glover’s holds a core memory of when she first took an interest in beekeeping
“When I was a little girl, my father had bees in the backyard,” said Sintes-Glover. “As a three-year old, I thought I knew how to beekeep.”
One day Sintes-Glover walked out to her father’s beehive with a kitchen towel and proceeded to take the hive apart. She had a plan, she said. Her mother didn’t realize she was outside until she came in with stings on her thigh.
“I don’t remember getting stung, I just remember I was very intent,” she said.
The passion further bloomed later.
“When I got bees, I realized there’s a huge learning curve,” she said. “It’s not something you can just learn in a year or two. There are people who are beekeeping for 10, 20 years who are still learning. They may get the gist of it, but it’s a lifelong process.”
San Joaquin County boasts 920,000 acres of agricultural land, which produced $3 billion in agriculture in 2020, according to the San Joaquin County Council of Governments. The statistics make this area the seventh largest producer of ag in the state.
In an ag-rich area, the importance of bees and pollinators can’t be overstated, but hive issues and worry about the future of the industry mean that beekeeping isn’t just a past-time for some residents here, but rather a mission to protect the environment and maintain a fragile ecosystem.
“Without the bee, they’re in trouble. We’re all in trouble,” said Ron Crump, a local bee farmer.
ANATOMY OF COLONY COLLAPSE
In 2017, a study published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) noted a decline in flying insects in recent decades, bees included. Flying insects, the study notes, are slowly disappearing.
The most threatened out of these disappearing species? Bees. Bees suffer from a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder.
Since 2006, people who keep bees have reported higher than normal colony losses. This has been attributed to colony collapse disorder, where most or all of the worker bees disappear, seemingly leaving the hive. The colony cannot function without the worker bees, who are the main pollinators and nectar collectors. All that’s left in these barren hives are a lonely queen bee, and a few nurses to care for the infants, according to PLOS.
“Colony collapse is caused by several things, the most important one being the Varroa mite,” said Crump.
Varroa destructor (aka Varroa mite) is a parasite that lives inside bees, feeding on the fatty metastoma of bees and transmitting viruses, essentially sucking the nutrients from them.
Varroa mites were first discovered in the early 1900s in Asia infesting the Asian Honey Bee (Apis cerana). However, due to the importing and exporting of flowers and fresh produce, transmission of the mites has now become a near global emergency. The only places thought to be free of V. destructor are parts of Hawaii, Australia, and Kufra in south-east Libya.
TREATING THE ISSUE
There are treatments that can be done to identify and prevent mites from spreading.
One such identification method involves taking half a cup of bees and dumping them in an isopropyl alcohol solution, shaking, and looking for the mites that sink to the bottom. The bees don’t survive.
Crump has a less invasive solution.
“What we do to treat the mites, is we measure how many mites are in a hive. We’ll take out a cup full of bees, put powdered sugar on them, the mites fall off, we shake them out onto a tray, and we count them. The reason for the alcohol wash shake is to get a better count. Not all the mites come off during the powder shake,” said Crump.
While killing bees to save the bees seems counter-productive, the queen lays 1,500 eggs a day. The death the bees face at the hands of the mites is far worse than that of the mite wash. A half a cup of bees is about 300 bees.
“The mite causes the bee to not live its full lifespan. The lifespan of a worker bee is about 45 days. If the bee only lives 40 or 35 days, the queen cannot keep up with the death-loss, and the hive gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller until it collapses, which is where we get the term colony collapse. Young hobbyist beekeepers go, ‘my bees left!’ No. They died. They don’t understand the cycle of it,” said Crump.
CALCULATING THE “BEE MATH”
With things changing so quickly, it’s important that beekeepers be aware of everything going on in their hives. How many queen cells do they have? About how many drones? How are they aware of the makeup of their hives?
“You have to know the Bee Math,” said Sintes-Glover.
The “Bee Math” is statistics on the lifecycle and daily habits of bees, like how long it takes for a new queen to be born after the previous one dies or how many eggs a queen lays per day.
The disappearance of bees brings risk.
The current world food supply relies heavily on just 12 plants, according to Canada’s International Development Research. Eight out of 12 of these rely mostly on the pollination provided by bees. Birds and other insects help with pollination, but they alone couldn’t make up the deficit.
“The bee gets a third to a half more product out of the bloom, so that is billions of dollars worth of nuts, and without that we would be hard-pressed for food, because we’ve become now dependent on all of this food … Less acreage, more food,” said Crump.
IMPORTANCE AT HOME
Bees are of specific importance to San Joaquin County, because all the commercial honeybees in the nation relocate here from February to April.
“We grow about 1.5 million acres of almonds in California,” said Darren Williams, Senior Director of Global Communications at the Almond Board of California, who had a booth at the Modesto Pollinator Festival on April 9. “It takes about two hives per acre, so about three million hives to pollinate the almond crop every year. Almonds are the first commercial crop to bloom in the United States every year. The commercial honeybees are over wintering, and they might be in South Dakota, they might be in Florida, they might be in Kansas — where I’m from — and in January, well before the bloom, they’re all gonna come here, to California, almost all of them because we need them to pollinate the crop here.”
Almond trees require significant amounts of water and pollination to produce fruit. Drought and loss of bees hit the $6 billion cash-crop hard, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center.
“Roughly on average it’s $200 per hive, per acre. Two hives per acre, about $400 per acre to pollinate the crop. It’s one of the highest input crops today when growing almonds. You think of water, certainly there’s a cost to water, but pollination is more expensive,” said Williams.
The price is high, but the business ecosystem has also changed.
“In the 40s, 50s, 60s, the bees that were here, were the bees that were here. They pollinated, the beekeeper got paid,” said Crump. “In the early 80s, we came up with the migratory beekeeping. Bees are brought in from all over the country. From Idaho, to the Dakotas, to Montana, they’re shipped in here by the truck load. Millions of hives, there’s just an economic demand. If you kept them here in California, there’s not enough food supply (for the bees), so they need to move the bee out where they can get it. They’ll go to the apples in Washington, the alfalfa in the Dakotas, the dandelions in Montana. It’s an economic issue.”
FOOD CHAIN EDUCATION
Bees are also an important part of the environment and the food chain, as not only are they food for other organisms, but also the plants they pollinate serve as food for other herbivores.
“One of the things we in the beekeeping industry are trying to get the world to recognize. Our bees are the same as cattle, chicken, sheep. I am a bee-farmer. I am not a beekeeper,” said Crump, who prefers to be called a bee farmer. “I farm these animals. I feed them, I treat them, I medicate them, I make sure that they’re healthy. I’m farming this animal. Someone could steal it (the hive), just like they could cattle. You steal a herd of cattle, there’s going to be a story on the news. Bees, not so much because ‘they’re just bees.’”
It’s not just big corporations or farmers that can make a difference and educate the masses on the importance of bees in the food chain, but also regular people, as seen in the La Lola Native Garden in Modesto, which is the site of the Modesto Pollinator Festival.
“We’ve had this native garden here for about five years. It’s kinda a way of bringing people into the garden and learning of the benefits of restoring habitat, and so I wanted to have an event where the community could come out and learn about the pollinators that are coming here now, and the plants they prefer,” said Rhonda Allen, garden coordinator.
The garden includes pollinator habitats. The intent of the garden is to be a source of education, said Allen.
“A lot of people think if they go into a nursery and buy a cute plant that looks pretty, that they’ve done their job for pollinators, and that really isn’t true, because some pollinators need specific plants to reproduce They may get nectar from a plant, but they may not reproduce using it, so there is a learning curve when it comes to natives,” said Allen.
