The local honey industry is abuzz with challenges.
It’s hard to say when honey was first harvested by mankind. Evidence of apiculture (the practice of intentional maintenance of honey bee colonies by humans) dates as far back as we can record. In Spain, cave paintings depicting apiculture are said to be around 7,000 years old, and honey consumption and reverence has been written about as far back as the texts of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. Fossilized remains of honeybees, dating back about 150 million years, suggest honey is older than humanity.
According to the National Honey Board (NHB), the average American today consumes 1.1 pounds of honey annually, and this number is increasing as more and more research is conducted on the health benefits of honey. It’s not only viewed as an alternative sweetener, but honey and honey products such as bee pollen, royal jelly (a milky substance secreted from the head of worker bees and fed to larvae and queen bees which is 50 percent protein) and propolis (a sticky resin collected by honeybees from substances in their environment and used as a powerful antibiotic) have even been identified as delivering beneficial medicinal properties. In addition, organic food trends in the North Bay point to an increase in people preferring locally produced products, and our many microclimates produce unique honey that’s in demand all across the country.
“I hit a niche market, because we do all our honey and our beekeeping chemical-free,” explains Scott Nelson, owner of Santa Rosa-based Wine Country Honey, which maintains hives across Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties. “We also decided to keep the honey unfiltered and raw. Initially, we sold almost all of it on the East Coast through our website.” The company has since grown its customer base to be equally popular closer to home; today, business is split about 50/50 between local and Internet sales. This demand from coast to coast led Nelson to build the business from 75 bee colonies three years ago to his current count of 1,700.
In addition to producing honey, bees are actually important to consumers because of their role as crop pollinators. Honeybees perform approximately 80 percent of all crop pollination, meaning, for example, that California’s billion-dollar almond crop alone is entirely dependent on honeybee pollination, annually relying on 1.2 million hives to pollinate 600,000 acres. With production of California almonds increasing 22 percent over the 2006/2007 crop year to a new record high of 1.092 billion pounds, the number of hives needed will continue to increase. And that’s not considering the other crops dependent on honeybee pollination, including apples, avocados, cherries, cucumbers, melons and sunflowers.
The bitter side of honey
With so much demand for both bees and honey, it’s devastating when beekeepers must deal with a multitude of challenges affecting not only our local apiaries (as the small sheds or stands that house multiple beehives are known), but also the honey industry on a national level.
These days, the problem getting the most media attention—and probably creating the most havoc and bewilderment—is Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. The Sonoma County Beekeepers’ Association describes notable characteristics of the disease as “a presence of honey and pollen within the failed hive, and a stark lack of quantities of dead bees in the immediate vicinity. If the bees had absconded (which would explain a lack of carcasses), they should have raided their food stores, leaving an empty hive.”
The disease is still relatively new (beekeepers only began reporting large losses in honey bee colonies in 2006), yet the numbers have been increasing ever since, with beekeepers in 22 states, including California, reporting losses of up to 90 percent. Nobody seems to know at this point what causes CCD, but it’s believed to be contagious, and beekeepers have been advised not to reuse the abandoned bee stores in other colonies (an otherwise common way to rebuild a hive).
Theories abound as to causes of the disease and include everything from an increased use of pesticides and GMO (genetically modified organisms) crops to hives weakened due to feeding on a single crop versus a diversified diet. Even the rise in the use of cell phones and other high-tech gadgets has been blamed; the theory being that radiation from mobile phones and other wireless technologies, including satellites, interferes with bees’ natural internal navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way back to their hives.
Much like a canary in a coal mine, bees are often one of the first species to be exposed to chemicals or environmental changes, and changes in bees and bee behavior can often signify a larger environmental problem. “There are possible issues with chemical use that bees are getting exposed to,” says Nelson. “Everyone has their own ideas. There are so many things that can affect the bees, because much like frogs in the waterways, bees are the first things to be exposed.”
While the problem is still in its infancy and hasn’t yet had any major research dedicated to it, the NHB announced in March of this year that it’s approved $100,000 in additional funding, bringing its total CCD research funding to $158,000. The money has been awarded to a working group composed of university faculty researchers, state regulatory officials, cooperative extension educators and industry representatives.
While some apiaries in the North Bay haven’t yet experienced any incidences of CCD, others have already been hit hard.
“We lost almost a thousand colonies this last year, which was a little more than half what we had,” says Nelson. “What’s interesting is, feral bees in this county seem to be disappearing, too. We’re getting calls from apple growers, who don’t normally require commercial beekeepers because there are so many feral bees in the area to pollinate their crops. But this year, we’re getting calls from growers saying, ‘My trees are blooming and I have no bees.’”
While beekeepers—particularly those with farms that are chemical-free—can expect to lose up to 30 percent of their hives in any given year due to simple survival of the species, even strong hives are dying this year.
“Whoever’s smart enough to figure out why there’s a problem—and how to solve it—will be a very wealthy person,” believes Helene Marshall, owner of American Canyon-based Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, which maintains 650 hives throughout the Bay Area.
“Nobody knows. It’s indicative of a lot of environmental stuff. There are so many abstract things out there now, because we’ve been doing so many crazy things with our environment. You have the GMOs, you have technology, you have pesticides in fields and you have people transporting bees all the way across the country, feeding them sugar water and diminishing the size of the hives so they’re easier to handle. We have bees in organic gardens in Sonoma County, but the bees can fly over the fence into a field where somebody’s using pesticides, and all those bees die.”
A different kind of bug
Another major problem that’s been affecting bee populations for years are mites, specifically the Varroa and Trachial mites. Microscopic Trachial mites live inside the breathing tubes of honeybees and typically weaken and kill the bees over winter. Varroa mites, which are a larger problem, are external honeybee parasites that attack both the adults and the brood, with a distinct preference for drone (male) brood. They suck the blood from both the adults and the developing brood, weakening and shortening the life span of the ones on which they feed. Emerging brood may be deformed with missing legs or wings.
“We could live with that, but what happens with these [mites] is, they tend to leave a virus behind them,” explains John Gipson, CEO of Santa Rosa-based Gipson’s Golden, a cooperative that maintains 68,000 hives among 10 families throughout Northern California. “The virus is probably more of what’s killing the bees than anything, rather than the mites themselves, which brought the problem.”
Untreated infestations of Varroa mites will quickly kill whole honeybee colonies. Indeed “just keeping the bees alive” was touted as the top challenge for many beekeepers when asked what obstacles they faced in their industry. And with beekeeping still considered a cottage industry, especially here in the North Bay, there’s little assistance or financial backing to conduct research to study some of these problems and devise solutions.
“There’s no treatment for mites anymore,” explains Marshall. “There used to be, but they’re no longer effective. It’s been going on for years, but it’s been getting progressively worse. This year, it went over the top, to where it really dug into people’s bottom lines.”
In July 2006, a research project sponsored by the National Honey Board, titled “Microbial Control of Varroa with the Fungus Metarhizium Anisopliae,” was completed but didn’t produce any measurable results. None of the experiments gave any significant level of mite control. So, for beekeepers who don’t want to fumigate their bees or use other pesticides, the only choice is to be heavily involved in maintaining their bees, watching for signs of mites and coming to terms with the fact they’ll lose some every year.
“I work hard to try to keep the hives in good shape,” says Hector Alvarez, a third-generation beekeeper and owner of Fulton-based Hector’s Honey, which maintains as many as 750 hives throughout Sonoma County. “If I see mites, I get on them before they hurt me a lot. I don’t leave [the bees] alone too long; you have to really work with them. If you leave them alone, or if you don’t take care of them, they’ll die.”
A bad move
Some beekeepers believe the movement of bees (or “MOB,” the practice of moving whole truckloads of bees to other parts of the state, country or even internationally to help pollinate crops) may play a part in the problem. Since pesticides are being used more and more often, strains of chemically resistant pests have evolved, and MOB prevents honeybees resistant to those native pests from evolving.
“We believe migratory beekeeping isn’t the best thing for the environment—and it’s definitely not the best thing for the bees,” says Katia Vincent, owner of Beekind in Sebastopol, a store established three years ago that partners with local beekeepers, including many backyard and “sideliner” beekeepers, to sell excess honey and also teach beekeeping. (Commercial honey farms generally have more than 300 hives, “sideliners” have 50 to 300 hives and backyard beekeepers generally have less than 50—usually only two to eight.) “Bees are trucked in from as far away as the East Coast [to pollinate California’s almond crop], so these bees are pretty stressed. Bees are pretty stationary creatures and need multiple sources of pollen. When they’re taken to a mono-crop, where they get only one source of pollen, it weakens the species down the line.”
Africanized, or “killer bees,” are another contender that North Bay beekeepers are watching out for. Africanized bees are hybrids of the African honeybee and are characterized by greater defensiveness than European honeybees. They’re more likely to attack a perceived threat and, when they do so, attack in larger numbers. This defensiveness has earned them the nickname “killer bees.” Typically, Africanized bees kill a queen bee and take over an existing hive. While they do produce honey, they aren’t as efficient as honeybees and will often build up a hive and then leave.
Africanized bees entered Imperial County in Southern California in 1994. Until recently, they remained principally in Imperial County but have spread to some degree to most of Southern California south of the San Gabriel Mountains (Imperial, San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties) in the last few years and have most recently been found in Kern and Ventura counties.
“They’re taking over the honeybees and are making it extremely difficult for beekeepers down south to manage the bees,” explains Gipson. “So Southern California beekeepers rely on us and other beekeepers to raise queens for them to make their hives gentler. They’ll never be able to remove the Africanized gene in them; it will still be what we consider a ‘hot hive’ [meaning protective gear is needed at all times while working with the bees].”
Beyond Mother Nature
Besides pests and as-yet-unexplained diseases, beekeepers are obviously also at the mercy of those hurdles that affect almost everyone in the agricultural industry, such as frost, floods and drought.
“With the weather being the way it is, there are several honeys that probably won’t arrive this year,” says Gipson. “We won’t get at least five different honey crops at all this year because of the climate, the lack of rain and the long winter. Everything started very late.”
In addition, beekeepers also need to contend with other standard business issues such as costs of utilities, fuel, land and labor, and find that magic pricing structure that boosts sales and still lets them make a profit in this labor-intensive business.
“I think too many beekeepers underprice their honey, because they think of it as a by-product and not a precious substance that takes so much work to produce,” says Marshall. “You have to work in the middle of the night, you have to work in a hot field—you have to like to work with things that are stinging you!”
A dying industry?
Beekeeping is more labor-intensive now than ever, due largely to the increasing mite problem and the need to constantly monitor and maintain the bees. In addition, as the North Bay becomes more urbanized, there are increasingly fewer open areas, so most commercial beekeepers need to keep hives in many different places—sometimes across several counties—which increases the time, resources and labor needed to maintain them. And yet, this imposed diversity and need to draw from the many micro-climates and diverse range of flowers and plants we have here also makes North Bay honey unique. And because so many individuals here have gardens, drought isn’t as much of an issue as it is in other parts of the country, since owners will generally still water their gardens, even during water shortages.
In combination, these challenges have led many beekeepers to leave the industry. Helene Marshall estimates there are less than half as many beekeepers in the United States today as there were 25 years ago. And she can’t blame them.
“If I were a son or daughter of a beekeeper, faced with all this stuff right now, and my Dad said, ‘How’d you like to take over the business?’ I’d say, ‘Are you crazy?’” quips Marshall. “I might have 1,000 hives today and none tomorrow. Are you crazy?”
John Gipson predicts a worldwide honey shortage by September of this year. Besides a possible shortage, most beekeepers also agree the industry’s challenges will soon impact consumers via higher prices and less variety.
“Honey prices are going up because it’s more expensive and difficult to produce,” explains Marshall. “There are going to be more honey imports coming into this country, but you won’t necessarily know where they’re coming from and they could be tainted. So good, pure, local honey is very valuable.”
Valuable, but increasingly hard to come by. “As of yesterday, I’ve been offered two more beekeeping operations because of CCD and because of the age [of the beekeepers],” says Gipson. “I’m just celebrating my 60th birthday, and most beekeepers I know are about 20 years my senior. It’s not a young industry. We’re trying all the time to educate new blood, bring new people in [to the industry].”
That’s where Beekind comes in. Not only does the shop sell its own brand of honey and pollen, it also offers a sales venue for local beekeepers and a place for individuals to buy locally produced honey and provides training workshops and classes ranging in topic from Introduction to Beekeeping to Swarming to Hive Inspections and Pest Management to Apitherapy (the study of hive medicines). These benefit individuals interested in beekeeping as a hobby or business, as well as the industry overall.
“New beekeepers need to take classes and learn as much as they can, before and during their beekeeping,” says Vincent. “It’s such a vast subject and there’s so much to learn. It never gets old. We want people to want to be beekeepers. It’s a serious passion.”
A sweet outlook
Despite the many challenges facing the honey industry, there’s also good news. More and more consumers are becoming educated about the health benefits of both honey and honey products and are using honey for everything from fending off allergies to a healthier alternative to refined sugar. In addition, trends such as the Slow Food Movement, the growing interest in regional and locally produced products both for health and environmental reasons, and the increasing fear of long-term effects of eating pesticide and GMO-exposed crops and related food products (for example, bees being fed syrup made with GMO-raised corn) has—and will continue to—boost demand for North Bay-produced honey. In fact, John Gipson believes honey from the North Bay is popular throughout the country both because of this area’s reputation as an organic farming leader but also for its “foodie” mentality.
“People like to know the source of their food now,” says Marshall. “We’ll tell people, ‘You can come to our honey house and see how we don’t process it. Look at the hives and you can see exactly where this is from.’”
Not only is there a rising interest in locally produced honey by consumers, but many high-end restaurants are also buyers of North Bay honey. Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, for example, can be found in Whole Foods, Apple Market and Real Foods, among other local grocery outlets; it’s also purchased by restaurants like the French Laundry, Chez Panisse and the Lark Creek Inn, just to name a few.
In the end, it’s passion for beekeeping that keeps the industry afloat. “The only thing I can tell you is, I’ll stay around for a while, because I really enjoy and like the bees,” says Alvarez. “The way they work together is like a family. They work hard.”
Fortunately for consumers who love local honey, there are also beekeepers who are willing to keep it coming.
