Malibu Grange

It’s official.  Beekeeping is cool.  The Obamas are doing it.  Hipster Silverlake kids do it (and tweet about it).  Many of your neighbors are doing it.  Most importantly, farmers are way into it and what could be cooler than that?  According to Los Angeles Honey Company owner Larry Walker, he hasn’t seen this much bee excitement since the early 1970s when the “back to the land nature” movement was all the craze.  For this family owned company since 1957, and one of the last honeybee supplier’s left in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, this current resurgence is like nothing they’ve seen over the last half-century Walker said.  This year, his store has experienced a 35% boost in entry-level beekeeping sales; just part of a movement he says that is sweeping the country.  “We have seen a lot of new faces here, though a few have changed their minds once they realized beekeeping means that at some point you are going to get stung,” Walker said.

Walker attributes the latest honeybee trend to a number of things.  First off, he said, greater media awareness for the current honeybee plight called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has awakened the public to overall environmental issues and whetted their appetite to be actively involved.  Secondly, many of the urban-dwellers who are taking up beekeeping find it a relaxing, outdoor alternative to their mostly indoor stressful lives.  And, of course, the Obamas have given honeybees the biggest plug of all.  “People actually come in and say, ‘the White House has honeybees so I want to keep honeybees,’” he said, referring to First Lady Michelle Obama’s decision to keep two honeybee hives on the south lawn.

My interest with honeybees began as a young girl watching my great-grandfather and great-uncle suited up in white bee protective gear, face mesh and all, pulling out frames for bee inspection from the numerous hives my great-grandfather kept in his yard.  That was in the late 1970s.  My great-grandfather stopped keeping bees soon after that, yet my entire family is still eating the dark decadent chestnut honey harvested 40 years earlier from those ultra-productive bees.

Jump to the present day and for the first time in my life I witnessed two massive swarms of honeybees sweep through the backyard in the form of a whirling dervish, cluster on a nearby branch, and no sooner had they huddled together, buzzed off quicker than you can squeeze honey from a honey bear.  Winter rains brought abundant spring blooms for bee forage, swelling colonies and firing up their instinct to swarm.  During a swarm, the elder queen bee takes half the colony to find a new home, while the new queen is reared with the remaining half to repopulate the old hive.  I must admit, I, too, was excited by the prospect that perhaps the bees would create an exposed comb colony right there in the tree, believing they were a fortuitous presence.

So, after all this positive new hoopla, who would have thought those cute little honeybees marauding the property for food could actually create some controversy?  After all, most summer afternoons they are so weighted down carrying mouthfuls of nectar and burdensome barbells of golden pollen wrapped around their skinny legs they are barely able to “beeline” back to their colony.  Well, it seems that honeybees are at the center of a pollinator maelstrom that has created a heated debate between a plethora of environmental, agricultural, economic, and plain old sweet-toothed hobbyist beekeepers.  The issues are many, but some of the main ones include discovering the cause of CCD, the commercialization of bees, native versus invasive species pollination and habitat destruction.  The one thing all sides agree upon, though, is the importance of healthy honeybee populations and other pollinators for the environment.

Many environmentalists and honeybee hobbyists believe commercial beekeepers that truck their bees around the country renting hives for agricultural pollination overwork and overstress their bees, exposing them to unnecessary pesticides and other farm chemicals suspecting of causing CCD.  The also argue that honeybees, which are by definition an invasive species brought hundreds of years ago from Europe, eliminate native bee populations, resulting in the degradation of native habitat.  Others contend that habitat destruction for development is causing problems for native pollinators, not honeybees, and that the two types of bees work more effectively together rather than alone in habitat restoration and agricultural crops.  And growers and agricultural economists maintain that without commercial honeybee pollination, we couldn’t produce the quantity of food we do because native pollinators just aren’t enough.

According to the California Department of Food and Agriculture estimates, the total value of crops pollinated by honeybees in California in 2008 was $6,512,889,100.  About 100 crops in the state use honeybees for pollination, including almonds (one of the largest and most expensive bee migrations in the country), walnuts, plums, avocados, figs, citrus, pomegranates, dates, artichokes, cucumbers and more.  Across the country, honeybees are responsible for pollinating one-third of our overall food supply.  According to University of California-Davis Entomologist and Extension Apiculturist Eric Mussen, about one-third of our daily food supply is either directly or indirectly connected to bees.  The direct connection is obvious with the sample list above, but the tangential connection is equally as important, such as with seed production that relies on pollination to produce adequate seed.

The only positive outcome from CCD Mussen said is the infusion of funding for honeybee research from a number of organizations, such as Hagen Daz and Burt’s Bees that rely on the honeybee products.  Mussen said previous instances of mass bee deaths have occurred in the past, but have not been this prolonged.  CCD, which kills the majority of adult worker bees eventually collapsing the entire colony, has been ongoing since 2003.  Unfortunately, the primary causes of CCD are still a mystery, though the fact that researchers had already sequenced the honeybee genome proves crucial now toward investigating the problem.

Some possible causes scientists are studying include bacterial, fungal and/or viral diseases, newer classes of potent insecticides, tracheal and Varroa mites, global warming for the stress it places on bees having to endure longer or shorter periods of heat or cold, or perhaps a combination of all the above.  “It is not the fault of the commercial beekeepers that CCD is starting,” Mussen said.  “You can actually see it happen – which bees go first and the resulting consequences to the hive.  We thought this would be simple with simple answers but there doesn’t seem to be anything simple about any of this.  This is a horribly complex problem and on a scale of 1 to 10 we may be at a 2 toward understanding it, but the good thing is that you don’t have to be at a 10 for things to eventually get better.”

If you are interested in getting your own bees, beekeepers strongly recommend reading books, taking classes and getting involved with one of the hundreds of local beekeeping organizations found across the country before starting.  These organizations will help you better understand local beekeeping regulations.  They also stress that keeping happy bees involves a lot of work, so be prepared, though the rewards are worth it.  In addition, be sensitive toward your neighbors by asking them first if they contest to your plan.  Keeping bees near someone with a bee allergy could prove deadly.

Perhaps most importantly, according to Mussen, you must ensure that bees have enough space to find adequate food and water.  Each hive needs approximately one acre of bloom found within the four mile radius in which bees forage from spring until late fall.  So plant plenty of bee friendly flowers suitable for your area and suggest your neighbors do the same.  Winter bloom is great, too, such as from Eucalyptus trees in California that flower in that season.  He also encourages everyone to reduce or eliminate the amount of chemicals – including fungicides, pesticides, herbicides – and all the other “-cides” that kill things to protect the overall environment, including our beloved honeybee.

Queen Bee surrounded by her workers in a new hive. She is off-center to the right without stripes.

The Pollinator Partnership has organized the Fourth Annual National Pollinator Week from June 21-27, 2010.  For more information, including regional planting guides and other pollinator resources visit them here at www.pollinator.org.

For information from the Western Apicultural Society at the University of California-Davis Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, visit www.groups.ucanr.org/WAS. Or contact Eric Mussen, Extension Apiculturist at ecmussen@ucdavis.edu.

The Los Angeles Honey Company is located at 1559 Fishburn Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90063, ph: (323) 264-2383.  No website is available.

To find an abundance of bee resources across the country, visit Bee Culture, the Magazine of American Beekeeping at www.beeculture.com.

For a different twist on conventional beekeeping, visit the Backward Beekeepers at www.beehuman.blogspot.com/.

The Los Angeles County Beekeepers is run by Walter McBride of McBride Apiaries.  Phone: (818) 730-9510.  Email: waltmcbride@yahoo.com

Beekeepers Association of Southern California is found at www.basc.org.