No bees, no food.
It sounds so dramatic that it seems trite. But we depend on honeybees to pollinate one-third of our produce, and their numbers are in decline. So the adage carries a dangerous amount of truth.
The total number of managed honeybee colonies has decreased from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million today, according to the Agricultural Research Service. At the same time, demand for pollination has grown, so the agricultural community depends on bee colonies that are transported from greater distances. Bees used to pollinate Maine’s wild blueberry crop, for instance, come from as far away as Florida.
Colony collapse disorder is one of the driving factors behind the drop in bee population. It happens when the majority of a colony’s worker bees disappear (the cause remains a mystery), leaving behind only the queen bee and immature bees without the adult bees needed to care for them. Bees also have faced a host of new parasites and pathogens that have further diminished their populations.
Annual bee colony losses during the winter have been unusually high since 2006. Between 2006 and 2011, beekeepers lost, on average, 33 percent of their colonies each year. A third of these losses were attributed to colony collapse disorder, the Agricultural Research Service reported earlier this year.
Habitat loss also has contributed to the decline in the honeybee population. In addition to houses, roads and strip malls replacing fields, agricultural practices that rely on single crops, which increase dependence on pesticide use, have contributed to the drop in bee numbers.
Lately, many concerned about bees’ alarming decline have emphasized replacing some of the lost habitat by planting bee-friendly gardens. It’s a small way each of us can contribute to stemming bee decline.
Turning some of your lawn into a garden of native flowering plants, for example, can help bees and the environment. Aside from helping bees, there are other environmental benefits to devoting part of your lawn to wildflowers. More than half of residential water use is for landscaping, most of it to water lawns, which cover more than 20 million acres in the United States, according to the National Wildlife Federation. In addition, use of gas-power lawn mowers accounts for 5 percent of the nation’s air pollution, and about 70 million pounds of fertilizer are used on residential lawns each year, the group reports.
Industrial use of pesticides is also a contributor to bee mortality. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules to limit honeybee exposure to pesticides by limiting use when crops are in flower and bees are being used for pollination.
Wyman’s, a major Washington County blueberry grower, has joined several efforts to boost bee populations. Now the company is giving away free wildflower seeds to encourage people to grow bee habitat. All you have to do is sign up online at www.nobeesnoberries.com.
The company — which still relies on ground spraying of pesticides, but halted aerial spraying a decade ago after a coalition of environmental groups threatened to sue the company — has a small wildflower garden outside its headquarters in Milbridge.
In 2008, company President Ed Flanagan testified before Congress in support of increased funding for research into colony collapse disorder. The company also has financially supported bee-related research, including fungicide use, at the University of Maine and Pennsylvania State University. Wyman’s provided $10,000 in funding to the Pollinator Partnership, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting pollinators and their habitats.
It also invested $24,000 into researching optimum pollinator habitats on Prince Edward Island, where Wyman’s owns blueberry fields and keeps bees. It cut down trees along the edges of blueberry fields there and planted flowers as part of its effort to maintain good habitats for the bees.
“There are no blueberries without pollinating honeybees,” Flanagan said last week.
