The Buzz About Bees

© CI
The small creatures that pollinate our crops help keep our food chain intact.
© CI
Charities in Zanzibar are working to improve beekeeping and honey harvesting techniques.
© Mitsuhiko Imamori/Minden Pictures
You can help save the pollinators by taking our Bee Good to the Planet Pledge!

Oct. 19, 2007: With partners, CI is helping to conserve key bee habitats on three continents. By protecting these areas, we are protecting the small creatures that pollinate our crops and keep our food chain intact. A donation from McDonald’s will support our efforts in South Africa and Mexico.

Africa: South Africa
In South Africa, we work with farmers, municipalities and communities to help them set aside bee habitat on their land. These landscapes contain hundreds of plant species – many pollinated by bees – that are important for horticultural, cut flower, food and medicinal extract markets. Setting aside blocks of native vegetation ensures that bees survive the cold winter months and continue to pollinate throughout the year, protecting the agricultural and tourism economy as well as biological diversity.

CI-South Africa is also working with a private diamond mining company to restore previously mined land to bee-friendly habitat. The restoration work will bring jobs to local people who have lost their jobs as mines have shut down.

Africa: Kenya
Scientists in Kenya are experimenting with ways to diversify local livelihoods by harvesting honey from stingless bees that are native to the region.

With support from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), of which CI is a member, the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) has introduced special hives to communities neighboring the coastal forests of East Africa. Local farmers have also been taught how to harvest the honey, which fetches a higher market price because it is hypoallergenic. Communities then have a direct incentive to protect these forests, ensuring their long-term conservation.

Africa: Zanzibar
On the spice island of Zanzibar off mainland Tanzania’s east coast, CEPF is supporting projects that help local communities generate income through protecting their natural resources. Among many projects run by two leading charities, CARE and the Wildlife Conservation Society, people are using funds to improve beekeeping and honey harvesting techniques. As a result, they are getting greater financial returns.

“In order to have bees that make honey, you’ve got to have flowers and you’ve got to have trees,” says Kirstin Siex, project director at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “It’s a win-win situation all around.”

Central America: Mexico
With eight of 11 families of bees found in Mexico, the country exports more honey than every other nation except for China and the United States.

Beekeeping is the bread and butter of communities living within or around Mexico’s key bee habitat. This is the case at the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, roughly 2 million acres of tropical forest in southeast Mexico. More than 80 communities, many of Mayan descent, surround the reserve and make their living from raising bees.

CI and our partners are working with two beekeeping communities that own and manage forested areas bordering the reserve themselves. We are developing a manual on best practices in honey production, which will be used for training 50 honey producers in each community. There are plans to make the manual available to other villages with the hopes of eventually reaching about 1,000 producers. Our overall efforts will help raise local awareness about the vital roles bees play in ecosystems and the nutritional value of honey.

Asia: China
In parts of southwest China, bees and people are longtime friends. CI and partners are monitoring the protection of two nature reserves in the region that are prime habitat for bees and other wildlife.

For decades, communities living near the Wanglang Nature Reserve in Sichuan province have relied on the forest to meet their daily needs. But over time, the reserve has suffered from continued logging and wildlife poaching by local people. In help reduce the strain on the people and the land, the reserve is working with communities on honey-related projects, building on an old tradition of honey made from local herbs and wild bees. The honey is produced using 70 different kinds of rare traditional Chinese medicinal herbs and flowers. Because of its excellent quality, Carrefour orders the honey product every harvest season for its grocery stores across China.

A long history of cultivating honey bees continues at another nature reserve, the Gaoligongshan, in western Yunnan province. The reserve conserves important wild bee habitat, as many plants here can produce honey. With several ethnic communities in the region, the nature reserve is trying to improve honey production, which in turn, will improve local livelihoods. Scientists also estimate that coffee plantations near Gaoligongshan enjoy higher yields as a result of healthy wild bee populations.

Related Links:
> Get Involved: Take our Bee Good to the Planet Pledge!
> Feature: Vanishing Bees
> Feature: Interesting Things About Small Things
> Partner Profile: McDonald's

What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?

By Gina Covina, Terrain. Posted October 16, 2007.

Everyone has a theory why the honeybees started dying off. Try malnutrition.
Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially operated pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they're fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: "When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a pretty whacked-out agricultural system."

On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks.

The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.

Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder.

It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson's bees are rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey. Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their numbers.

Bees v. SUVS

Bees took to the streets of Berkeley, California, swarming an SUV before the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, in hopes of attracting quality legal and policy help to their cause.

The bees appealed to humans to be better planetary citizens: stop driving and immediately switch to local, organic agriculture, they said.

The bees announced that they would not participate in pollination until their demands were met, with the exception of small organic farms.

Wanted: Citizen scientists to help track wild bees in Illinois

Honey bee colonies are in decline in many states, but little is known about their wild cousins, the bumble bees, or, for that matter, honey bees living on their own in the wild without beekeepers.

Anzeige

A new initiative from the University of Illinois seeks to build a better record of honey bee and bumble bee abundance and distribution in Illinois by recruiting citizen scientists to report on wild bees seen anywhere in the state.

Beginning Thursday (Oct. 4) the BeeSpotter Web site will connect bee enthusiasts to resources that will help them identify local bees, post photographs and enter geographic information about wild bees seen in backyards, parks or other Illinois locales.

U. of I. entomology professor and department head May Berenbaum will announce the Web site launch during a presentation at the Chicago Cultural Center on Thursday. Her presentation, on the ongoing pollinator crisis in North America, will describe the widespread decline in the viability of animals that transport pollen and allow most of the planet’s flowering plants to reproduce.

Berenbaum has testified before Congress on colony collapse disorder, a mysterious malady of North American honey bees. She also chaired the National Research Council committee that reported this year on the status of pollinators in North America.

The idea for the BeeSpotter Web site emerged from recommendations in that study, Berenbaum said. A key finding was that too little information on pollinator abundance and distribution has been collected, particularly in the U.S.

“We don’t know what is going on with pollinators because America has never deemed it important enough to try to keep track of its pollination resources,” Berenbaum said.

“Given that 90 crops in the U.S. agricultural sector depend on a single species of pollinator, and other crops depend on other pollinators, it would seem that for economic reasons alone this has been a serious oversight on our part,” she said.

There are too few pollination experts in the U.S. to bridge the data gap, she said. The new Web site seeks to address the problem by involving citizen scientists in bee-monitoring efforts. Participants will feed their information into a database, interact with experts in the field who will answer their questions and connect them to other resources, such as the Illinois Natural History Survey database of North American bees.

BeeSpotter will provide a bee family tree, with biographies of the honey bee and each of the 12 species of bumble bees in Illinois. It will include a summary of the status of North American pollinators, with visual keys for identifying bees and distinguishing them from other insects. A data entry site will allow visitors to post digital photos, plot the location and describe the characteristics of bees they have seen.

More content will be added to the Web site throughout the fall, including information about the honey bee genome, the economic impact of bees, how to avoid and treat bee stings and how to build a bee-friendly garden.