The Latest Buzz
Asian mites are decimating honeybee hives throughout the country, a worrisome trend for agriculture, which depends on bees to pollinate crops buzz.

BY JILL KRAMER

Bob LaBelle had been keeping bees in his father’s backyard for 48 years, tending the hives and harvesting the honey every year. But last January when he and his dad went out back to see how the bees were doing, they were gone. Both hives were empty. The likely cause: Varroa mites.

Beekeepers all over the United States are losing their colonies to the mites. It’s serious business to commercial beekeepers and the farmers who depend on them to pollinate their crops. To backyard bee enthusiasts like Bob LaBelle, it’s also a heartbreak.

Bob, 59, is a third-generation beekeeper. His 88-year-old father, Russell, learned the craft from his father growing up in Ohio. The family relocated to California after World War II, Russell bought a lot in what was then pastureland north of San Francisco and built the house where Bob grew up. When Bob was 10, he talked his father and grandfather into taking up the hobby again. “We sent away to Montgomery Ward for the bees,” he says. “You could buy flattened hives with tongue-and-groove corners and we’d put them together and paint them and make all the frames.”

Enjoying the honey they gather is only part of the lure for beekeepers. The main attraction is getting a god’s-eye view of a well-ordered and alien world. “They are a very sophisticated, complex society and it’s amazing how they function,” says Russell. “They know how long to let the honey age and cure in those little cells so it evaporates down to a certain acidity. And when it reaches that acidity, then fungus and mold won’t grow. These guys instinctively know how long it takes to get where fungus and mold won’t grow and then they put a cap on it.”

The “guys” Russell refers to are actually girls. Females do all the work in honeybee society, and they greatly outnumber the males, or drones. But if life is a labor for the female, it’s even more brutal for the male. The rule here is, do your job or die. Drones serve only one function, and most of them aren’t very successful at that: When the queen flies out of the hive to mate, all the drones follow her and only the strongest catch up with her. She can mate up to 17 times, a feat she performs in midair. The drones she rejects are the lucky ones. The queen’s mates don’t live to brag about it back in the locker room. They give up not only their lives but their sexual apparatus instantly upon servicing the queen. The unsuccessful suitors live only a few months longer, until the worker bees tire of supporting them and throw them out of the hive. It’s hard out there for a drone.

• • • •

NOW, WITH THE infestation of Varroa mites, entire colonies of honeybees are collapsing. At a recent meeting of the Marin Beekeepers Association, most of the members had lost hives. About 30 people crowded into the meeting room at the Pine Street Clinic in San Anselmo to get pointers on how to combat the mites from entomologist Eric Mussen of UC Davis. One of his recommendations was to use a screened board at the bottom of the box that houses the hive, so that the mites will fall through after feasting on the bees. “When the mites only fall a short distance, you’ve got to have something that catches them and stops them, like a sticky board or vegetable oil, because if you don’t, they’ll just crawl back up again,” says Mussen, a square-jawed Midwesterner with Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses and a plain-spoken style. He also suggested shaking powdered sugar down between the combs. “It encourages the bees to groom when they get powdered. It powders up the pads of the mites and they can’t hold on so well and they fall off. Powdered sugar is the least noxious thing we can use.”

There are also chemical treatments, which commercial beekeepers have come to rely on but hobbyists try to avoid. The LaBelles tried Apistan a couple of years ago, after watching the number of mites on their bees steadily increase over the previous three years. The chemical is packaged on treated strips that are hung inside the hive. “You put the Apistan strips up in the fall, after you’ve taken your honey because you don’t want any chemical contamination of the honey,” says Russell. “Bees are pretty dormant during the winter. If the mites walk across these strips, evidently it kills them.”

The LaBelles lost their hives anyway. “If you don’t put the Apistan in at the right time, or for too long a period of time, the mites become resistant to it,” says Bob. “Then when they migrate to another hive, they breed other Apistan-resistant mites. So it’s a never-ending battle.”

When a colony gets weak from infestation, the bees abandon the hive, taking many of the mites with them. They’ll either start a new mite-infested hive, or go to another existing colony and contaminate that one. Another way the mites spread is when healthy bees from a nearby hive invade the collapsing colony to steal the honey. They’ll pick up mites and carry them back home.

Any bees remaining in a dying hive are prey to yellow jackets, which like to eat honey as well as honeybee brood, or larvae. Cheryl Mardesich, a beekeeper in San Rafael, witnessed a slaughter at her backyard hive last year. “Last year it caught me completely off guard,” she says. “I walked out at the end of the summer and saw yellow jackets inside. I blocked off the entrance and did whatever I could to keep them out but I had to let the bees out at some point, and as soon as I opened up the little gate, the yellow jackets would go in and ravage them. It was a horrible thing to watch. They’d just rip them apart. It was really quite shocking.”

The bees in managed hives aren’t native to the United States. Different strains of bees vary in their honey-making abilities, and the best producers are the ones known as the Western or European honeybee. For the last 150 years, Italian bees were considered the most productive. Unfortunately, they’re also particularly susceptible to Varroa mites. Beekeepers lately have been turning to Russian bees. They’re also good producers and—so far—seem to be more resistant to the mites.

• • • •

VARROA MITES EVOLVED in Asia, along with the bees native to that part of the world. The Asian bees are unfazed by the mites, but they don’t make much honey. It’s thought that the mites were either brought in illegally or made their way across the continents on the bodies of bees that have swarmed onto ships while in port. At this point, they’ve been found everywhere except Australia and Hawaii.

“They’re everywhere honeybees are kept,” says Dr. Jeff Pettis, lead researcher with the Agricultural Research Service, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “And they’re basically the number one threat to beekeeping worldwide. Once they’re established, they’re almost impossible to eradicate.”

Two years ago, 50-60 percent of our bee colonies were lost, says Pettis, and most of the loss was due to the mites. The good news is that managed bees appear to be building up some resistance. “It used to take only a year, year and a half, before a colony would die. Sometimes now the bees can go for a few years without treatment. But if you don’t do a good job of managing your hives, your colonies will die from this parasite. It’s harder work and there aren’t that many beekeepers that want to work that hard for the return.”

Western honeybees are used by commercial beekeepers for pollinating large agricultural tracts because whole colonies can be transported easily. Truckloads of honeybees are piled onto flatbeds, covered with nets and moved around the country. They follow the crops like migrant workers, rented out to farmers to pollinate their fields. Almond growers in California and blueberry growers in Maine are among the biggest customers. Lately, the availability of fewer bees has been driving up the price. “The pollination fee for almonds, for example, went from $65 or $75 a colony, up to $150 a colony because bees were in such short supply,” says Pettis. “I think the day is coming when we’re going to see true shortages.”

While agribusiness will feel the pinch, smaller farming operations can get by with native pollinators. There are over 1,600 species of native bees that aren’t susceptible to Varroa mites. They don’t make any honey, either. They nest in the ground and don’t fly very far from home.

Western honeybees can fly as far as 6 miles from their hive, although they usually don’t travel much more than half that distance. They use the position of the sun to locate their favorite foraging areas, and to find the hive when they return with nectar and pollen. “You can have hundreds of hives in the same close proximity and they all find their own hive,” says Bob LaBelle. “I did some experiments in high school where I’d move hives around every night, and they just re-orient themselves the next day.” Move the hive while they’re out, however, and they’re lost; they’ll only return to where it was when they left.

• • • •

BOB LENDS ME his father’s white bee suit to take me out to the hive. You don’t want to approach bees wearing dark colors—they might mistake you for a bear or some other honey-stealer. I’m covered from head to foot in the zip-up outfit, with rubber bands around my ankles so that bees can’t fly up inside the pants. There’s a helmet on my head and netting for my face, all attached to the suit. Heavy white gloves protect my hands and forearms. It’s probably overkill, Bob tells me. Honeybees are fairly docile creatures.

Since Russell built this house, the neighborhood, Sleepy Hollow, has grown into an upscale suburb. The homes are surrounded by spacious lawns and gardens, mature redwoods and oaks. But neighbors tend to get nervous about beehives in the vicinity, so it doesn’t hurt that Bob lives next door and the hive is kept at the dividing line between the two properties. For added goodwill, Russell runs an ad in the Sleepy Hollow newspaper offering to remove any swarms that might show up in someone’s yard.

When a hive gets too crowded, the queen takes off with about half the hive to look for a new home. “Now, she’s left behind a bunch of queen cells in the old hive,” explains Russell. “One of those will hatch and go around and kill all the other queen cells. Or two will hatch at the same time and fight until there’s one survivor. She is the new queen.” Meanwhile, some 30,000 bees from the old colony may be clumped together in a neighbor’s tree, sending out scouts in search of a permanent place to settle. That’s where Russell comes in. “You just saw a limb off, clip off the swarm, put it in a box and take it back and it becomes a new colony for you,” says Bob.

For now, Bob and Russell have only one hive. Three wooden boxes are stacked, one on top of another, on a stand a few feet above the ground. The queen lays her eggs in the bottom two boxes; the shallower top box holds the honey that Bob and Russell will eventually harvest. The day is overcast, so the bees aren’t as active as they would be in full sunshine. But it’s the first dry day after a stretch of rainy weather, so some of them are foraging while they can. “It can be raining like crazy and really cold and wet and as soon as the sun peeks through, it stops raining, they come out and go right to work immediately,” says Bob. “And they’ll be like that from sunup to sundown. Very industrious. It’s one of the reasons the Mormons have the honeybee colony as their symbol.”

Dozens of bees are gathered at the bottom of the lowest box, the entrance to the hive. Tens of thousands more are inside. “If the sun were out, there would probably be five to 10 times as many bees right at the entrance,” says Bob. Many of the bees going inside are carrying bright yellow and orange sacks of pollen on their back legs. “The color varies depending on the type of flower they’ve gone to. They go for the nectar to produce honey and in the process of foraging for the nectar, they almost accidentally pick up the pollen on their legs.” The younger workers are meeting them at the entrance. Some of the hive bees act as guards, keeping out bees from foreign colonies. Other young hive bees will take the nectar and pollen from the foragers and store them in the cells of the comb. The nectar will be changed into honey. A mixture of honey and pollen is fed to the larvae, or brood.

Bob removes the top box, then takes a flat metal spatula-like tool and pries off the top of the next box, revealing the tops of the wooden frames that hold the combs. Ten frames are hanging side-by-side in the box, with just enough space between them for the bees to get around. Masses of bees are crawling around the tops of the frames. Right in the center of the crowd is one bee moving quite differently from everyone else. She’s doing what’s called the “waggle dance”—running in a tight circle, her whole body vibrating. “That’s how they communicate,” says Bob. “The way she wiggles and turns—clockwise or counterclockwise or figure eights—communicates where the nectar is.” The dancer is telling the other bees the distance from the hive to the nectar source and how to fly in relation to the position of the sun.

After losing their Italian bees last winter, the LaBelles bought Russian bees for their new colony, which they hope will be more resistant to mites. So far, they look good and healthy. The real test will be whether they survive through next winter.

M.E.A. McNeil, a San Anselmo beekeeper who’s been studying for her master beekeeping certification, says that the battle against the mites is important for several reasons. Not only do managed honeybees pollinate crops and gardens and keep us supplied with honey, she believes they also may be stopping the advance of Africanized bees. These more aggressive and potentially dangerous bees had been steadily moving north since they were first introduced in Brazil in the 1950s. They made their way into Texas in 1990 and reached California four years later. But they haven’t made it past the Central Valley, and McNeil thinks it’s because of all the backyard beekeepers in Northern California.

“We have everything the African bees need here,” she says. “We have forage available most of the year. But there’s a saturation here of managed bees and they’re taking the forage. And that’s one of the reasons the African bees aren’t moving further north. It looks like beekeepers are barriers to the spread of the African bee.”

Think about that next time you see a swarm of honeybees. Then give Russell LaBelle a call.

PHOTOS OF BOB LABELLE BY RORY MCNAMARA

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