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a primal balance
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."
-Abraham Maslow
Everyday in the news we read about disease spreading around the world. The diseases are not new, but until now have been contained in natural systems where the host has had time to develop immunity. The grief comes when the disease is moved into another system where there is no immunity. This applies to all manner of pests, parasites, bacteria and virus. See our Links for more.
On a black day for honeybees, a mite named varroa destructor which did no harm at home in Asia got moved to Europe and America with devestating consequences. Most wild honeybees are long dead. Most beekeepers today believe that bees can be kept alive only by using toxic drugs and chemicals in their beehives to control varroa and diseases made worse by stressed colonies.
The toxins create a second problem without solving the first, stated plainly by one concerned beekeeper: They tell us how to put this stuff in our beehives but never tell us how to get it out.
We believe that the basic requirement for pure honey is a population of healthy bees, not on drugs and not living in toxic beehives. It can be done. So why should it not?
A hundred and more years ago it was learned that bees could be made larger or smaller by changing the size of their honeycomb cells, it was then imagined that larger bees would better serve mankind. History documents a time of quarrel and controversy, nevertheless big bees were commercialized, first in Europe and then America. Things seemed OK at first, but in recent decades bees have suffered a steep decline, leading to the desperate remedies of today.
The worst bee killers have been the imported varroa parasites which are now almost completely resistant to the chemicals used to control them. The necessity of pollinating billions of dollars worth of crops using bees drives the government and industry to find more effective chemicals. This vast effort to pollinate is the province of migratory beekeeping, trucking hundreds of thousands of beehives to where they are needed. Blossoms do not wait, and there is significant economic pressure to get the bees on the job on time, sick or on drugs or not.
What limits researchers' ability to snuff out the mite is that they must not quite kill the honeybee at the same time. Toxins are supposed to be certified by the federal government, but billion dollar industries attract plenty of backdoor enterprise. You don't have to be around bees long to hear stories of truly nasty smuggled drugs and chemicals being used.
In contrast to the big business of migratory beekeeping are small local beekeepers, those who keep their bees in one place year around, whose main interest is honey, pollination of gardens, flowers and fruit trees being a bonus.
When pollination is done, migratory beekeepers move to wherever their bees can feed and when the food runs out they move on; chasing honey it is called, and this is where migratory and local beekeepers intersect. It can be tense.
The hard truth is that travel is a proven way to spread disease and pests and a bee problem in one place is soon a bee problem everywhere.
Ed and Dee Lusby have four generations of beekeeping to call upon and, when they lost several hundred colonies of bees to varroa mites a few years back, they studied the history of bees to find answers. They discovered several reasons why big bees might have health problems. To test their ideas, they regressed the size of their bees. It was an improvement, so they did it again. By reducing the size of their bees by about 10 percent - back to what they were 100 years ago - it seems a natural balance is at hand.
The Lusbys attribute success one-third to the small physical size of the bees, one-third to breeding and gene selection, and one-third to allowing the bees to live on their natural forage of nectar and pollen. Bees make more queens than they actually need, gene selection is like getting first pick from a litter of puppies. There are many techniques for stimulating bees through food and supplements, most of which disrupt the natural cycles of the honeybee, causing stress.
It is costly - it can take two or more years - to resize a colony of bees to the proportions of their small forebears (shake them onto small cell foundation and let them learn to build small comb! – and toss out their mistakes year by year until they get it right, all the while accepting a loss of income until the colonies regain their strength). Regressing bee size, however, appears to be fundamental to organic beekeeping.
The easiest problem for the organic beekeeper to solve is the need to shelter bees in wooden boxes, but even this is a commitment to eliminate plastics, plywood and other materials which emit toxins.
The beekeeper must also provide a foundation of the bees’ wax upon which they draw honeycomb (using the foundation as a template), but virtually all obtainable foundation is inextricably contaminated to some degree.
Bees produce wax to cap their seasonal honey. These cappings, removed by the beekeeper to extract the honey, patiently collected as time goes by, are the main source of organic wax. It can then be made into foundation for future generations of bees – providing one has the anachronistic tools and skills.
A healthy bee, like a healthy human, requires the correct diet of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Carbohydrates come from the nectar of plant blossoms, fat and protein from pollen. A bee will easily forage two miles for food and can go five. Some will die if they encounter insecticides, some may return to the hive innocently bearing toxic food and many will die. Only by having access to remote land can wide-area sources of safe nectar and pollen be assured.
Given the right care and conditions, bees will store organic honey, which must then be extracted from the comb and bottled. It is very tempting to heat the honey so that it moves faster, and to filter it to clarify it. But heat destroys nutrients and filtering removes them. The finest honey is extracted at a warm ambient temperature and left to settle for a month in stainless steel tanks before bottling.
Truly organic honey is not easy to produce, nor is it easy to obtain. The best source is a trusted beekeeper.