Golden opportunity: Beekeepers turn hobby into a honey-maker

West Hawaii Today
By Colleen Schrappen St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

DES PERES, Mo. — A vegetable garden was first on Tom Millis’ to-do list when he bought his home in the St. Louis suburb of Des Peres a decade ago. Then he and his now-wife, Elsa Stuart, added native flowers to their 2-acre property.

Bees were next. They’d help pollinate the plants and make a little honey, maybe even enough to give to friends.

Last summer, the couple harvested 1,600 pounds.

“What are we going to do with all this honey?” Stuart asked Millis.

They decided to form a bee corporation.

In October, the couple launched Millis Meadows, joining the ranks of hobbyists-turned-entrepreneurs whose fascination with the communal insects blossomed into side businesses selling hive products. In the United States, honeybees have bounced back since colony collapse disorder was identified in the mid-2000s, increasing awareness of the pollinators’ plight. Honey consumption has almost doubled over the past 50 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, even as the use of other caloric sweeteners has dropped.

Most backyard beekeepers start small after learning about the practice from a family member or on social media. Millis and Stuart, both veterinarians, dove into research on the invertebrates and converted their garage into a workspace before they added any flying tenants to their garden. At least six apiarist organizations in the region offer mentoring and workshops to help “newbees” establish colonies, mitigate setbacks and minimize the inevitable stings.

“You can’t just master it in a year,” said John Pashia of Affton. “There’s very much an art to the science.”

Pashia joined the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association 15 years ago after a friend got him interested in the practice. At the time, about a dozen people were regulars at meetings. Now the club claims hundreds of members.

“People are becoming more connected to nature and wanting to know where their food comes from,” Pashia said. “As a hobby, it’s extremely interesting. You’re overwhelmed by Mother Nature.”

Bee colonies are complex ecosystems, and their care requires time and money. Most backyard hives resemble a chest of drawers, with 10-inch-tall wooden boxes called “deeps” on the bottom and shallower “supers” stacked on top. Inside are eight to 10 frames into which worker bees construct honeycomb. The hexagonal wax cells can hold eggs, pollen and nectar — which the workers dehydrate by fanning it with their translucent wings until it thickens into honey.

Honey is collected from the supers — a barrier called an excluder keeps the queen from laying eggs in them — usually in the summer or fall. Extracting equipment can cost thousands of dollars. The process takes days to complete.

Jeremy Idleman of Ballwin was prodded into beekeeping a few years ago by an uncle, after Idleman returned from an Army deployment to Iraq.

“I had some anger issues,” he said.

He learned that beekeeping had been recommended for World War I veterans to help them recover from shell shock.

“I found that I was much more calm when I was working the bees,” Idleman said. “There’s a lot of therapeutic qualities to them.”

The constant hum of the hive is soothing, like white noise. Success is measurable. Every couple of days, he checks on his growing brood. He slides out the frames, each one heavy with bees, and drips of nectar glisten in the sunlight.

At harvest time, Idleman uses a hot knife to slice the caps off the comb, the wax falling away in a long curl. A centrifuge spins the honey out of the frames. It slides down the wall of the steel drum and out a spigot, like a golden ribbon.

“It all forces you to be present,” Idleman said. “I figured if it worked for me, it would work for others.”

In 2016, he formed BeeFound for veterans and first responders with post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition to the five hives he keeps, he manages a “foster apiary” for the nonprofit’s Bees for Bravery program applicants. He’s given away 20 hives this year and more than a dozen people are on the waiting list.

Idleman bottled 200 pounds of his own honey last year. He sells it online, for $13 a jar, to help fund BeeFound.

Beyond clover

Like beer and olive oil, honey varieties have proliferated in recent years amid a growing appreciation for flavor and style nuances. Clover is the most common of the more than 300 types in the United States, which vary based on local flowers.

Pat Jackson of Hazelwood, Mo., an all-day tea drinker, says she can taste the changing of the seasons when she stirs in her honey.

“In the spring, it’s a very delicate flavor,” she said. “Fall honey is a darker color. The flavor is deeper.”

Jackson gets her sweet fix from Tinker’s Bees and Pure Raw Honey, owned by Guy and Tracy Tinker of Florissant, Mo.

“What the bees are foraging on makes the honey completely different,” said Guy Tinker, a computer technician.

The Tinkers started tending bees in 2014. In their second year, they collected enough honey to give to friends. By the fourth year, they were ready to form an LLC. They sell primarily online and at a few local shops.

Rob Kravitz of south St. Louis pops a teaspoon of Tinker’s each day with his dose of vitamins. “It helps me wake up in the morning,” he said.

Honey, which contains vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, enjoys a healthy reputation that eludes many other sweeteners. Its sugars have been partly broken down by bees, making them easier for some people to digest. Honey can work as a cough suppressant or a salve for wounds.

Many consumers swear by local honey as an allergy remedy, though clinical studies have not borne that out; the Mayo Clinic refers to it as a “sweet placebo.”

For Ann Shields of Des Peres, buying local honey is more about promoting environmental health, anyway.

“Those bees live happy lives, and it feels good for me to support that,” she said.

She uses Millis Meadows’ $8 wildflower honey in marinades for her barbecue, spread on toast and as a throat-soother when she strains her voice from teaching.

It’s delicious, and it’s easy, Shields said: “I get the benefit without the buzzing.”

Nonprofit moves forward with lawsuit to protect Hawaiian honeycreeper

Star Advertiser
By Nina Wu –

The Center for Biological Diversity today filed suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to designate critical habitat and develop a recovery plan for the iiwi, a cherished forest bird in Hawaii.

The move comes five months after the national nonprofit filed a formal notice of intent to sue due to lack of progress. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for Hawaii.

“The beautiful iiwi needs our help and it needs it now,” said Maxx Phillips, the center’s Hawaii director and staff attorney, in a news release. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s foot-dragging is unacceptable. Without the protections provided by critical habitat and a valid recovery plan, iiwi will continue down a heartbreaking path towards extinction.”

Iiwi, or Drepani coccinea, are medium-sized honeycreepers with bright, red plumage, black wings and distinctive, curved bills used to drink nectar.

The iiwi was listed in 2017 as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act due to extensive threats from mosquito-borne diseases such as avian malaria, as well as loss of habitat due to rapid ohia death and climate change.

Once abundant across the state — from the coastal lowlands where they foraged for food to the high mountain forests where they nested — the iiwi today can only be found in a narrow band of forest on East Maui, and elevated windward slopes of Hawaii island, and on Kauai.

They are now gone from the islands of Lanai, Oahu, Molokai and West Maui, the center said, and the Kauai population is likely to go extinct within 30 years.

Under the act, the agency is required to designate critical habitat with its listing determination and develop a recovery plan for the bird — but has failed to do so, according to the suit.

Phillips said there are measures the USFWS could take right now — including the restoration of upland forests at higher elevations, fencing off of potential breeding areas, and eradication of ungulates such as pigs, which create breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

The USFWS, in a December letter to Phillips after receiving the notice of intent to sue, said development of a recovery plan for iiwi is underway under the leadership of its Pacific Islands Fish and Wildlife Office, and that a draft should be available for public review in the Federal Register by October.

The USFWS said, however, that it could not offer a timeframe for designating a critical habitat for iiwi due to its “national workload within the limited budget Congress has set.” The agency already has a 5-year National Listing Workplan for 12-month petition findings and status reviews, and will need to prioritize its workload.

Among those priorities, the agency said, are the designation of critical habitat for 14 Hawaiian species, including the picture-wing fly, by Feb. 28, 2023 as a result of a settlement with the center following an earlier lawsuit.

The center says Hawaiian forest birds are in crisis, with 68% of Hawaii’s known endemic bird species have already gone extinct because of habitat loss, disease and invasive predators.

“The longer that the service drags their feet, the closer these species come to a tipping point of going extinct,” said Phillips. “Time is of the essence. Any delay is really inexcusable.”

BBC Nature – Honeybee virus: Varroa mite spreads lethal disease

A parasitic mite has helped a virus wipe out billions of honeybees throughout the globe, say scientists.

A team studying honeybees in Hawaii found that the Varroa mite helped spread a particularly nasty strain of a disease called deformed wing virus.

The mites act as tiny incubators of one deadly form of the disease, and inject it directly into the bees’ blood.

This has led to “one of the most widely-distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet”.

The findings are reported in the journal Science.

The team, led by Dr Stephen Martin from the University of Sheffield, studied the honeybees in Hawaii, where Varroa was accidentally brought from California just five years ago.

Crucially some Hawaiian islands have honeybee colonies that are still Varroa-free.

This provided the team with a unique natural laboratory; they could compare recently-infected colonies with those free from the parasite, and paint a biological picture of exactly how Varroa affected the bees.

The team spent two years monitoring colonies – screening Varroa-infected and uninfected bees to see what viruses lived in their bodies.

Dr Martin explained to BBC Nature that most viruses were not normally harmful to the bees, but the mite “selected” one lethal strain of one specific virus.

“In an infected bee there can be more viral particles than there are people on the planet,” Dr Martin explained.

“There’s a vast diversity of viral strains within a bee, and most of them are adapted to exist in their own little bit of the insect; they get on quite happily.”

But the mite, he explained, “shifts something”.

New bee research details harm from insecticide

A pitched battle about why bee populations around the world are declining so rapidly has been joined by two new studies pointing directly at the harm from insecticides most commonly used by grain, cotton, bean and vegetable farmers.

Pesticides were an early suspect, but many additional factors appear to be at play — including a relatively new invasive mite that kills bees in their hives, loss of open land for foraging, and the stresses on honeybee colonies caused by moving them from site to site for agricultural pollinating.

The new bee research, some of the most extensive done involving complex field studies rather than simpler laboratory work, found that exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides did not kill the bees directly, but changed their behavior in harmful ways. In particular, the insecticide made the honeybees and bumblebees somewhat less able to forage for food and return with it to their hives.

While the authors of the studies published Thursday in the journal Science do not conclude that the pesticides are the sole cause of the American and international decline in bees or the more immediate and worrisome phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, they say that the omnipresent chemicals have a clearly harmful effect on beehives.

Honeycreeper an Asian immigrant

Scientists from the Smithsonian using DNA data sets to outline the evolutionary family tree of the Hawaiian honeycreeper have determined that the 56 species of the native bird evolved from the Eurasian rosefinch.

In another important finding, the researchers linked the timing of the evolution of the honeycreeper to the formation of the four main Hawaiian Islands.

“It was fascinating to be able to tie a biological system to geological formation and allowed us to become the first to offer a full picture of these birds’ adaptive history,” said Helen James, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and an author of a paper on the study.

Fern Duvall, state Forestry and Wildlife Division wildlife biologist, who was not involved with this study but is working with two of the authors of the paper, James and Rob Fleischer, on a similar project with shorebirds, called the findings “dynamic” and “unique.”

Putting the research in context, Duvall noted that many bird experts believed the honeycreepers to be descendants of the house finch of North America. Instead, the researchers say the Eurasian rosefinch from Asia is the mother bird of the species.

As for the evolutionary discoveries, Duvall said it had been theorized that there was a link between the biologic and geologic development of the birds to the islands. The scientific connection made in the study is new, he said.

“For them to show that that is the case is dynamic,” he said Wednesday. “I think it’s an excellent example that birds’ forms are tied to diverse habitat types.”

Canada seeks to breed a better honey bee

OTTAWA – FOLLOWING a massive bee die-off in parts of the world, two Canadian universities on Wednesday launched an effort to breed honey bees resistant to pests and diseases.

Led by the universities of Guelph and Manitoba, the programme will try to breed a better bee through genetic selection.

It will also screen new products for pest and disease control, and try to come up with new ways of managing pollination colonies that face risks that include parasites, bacterial infections and pesticides resulting from the impact of human activities on the environment.

Ottawa is providing US$244,000 (S$300,748) to the Ontario Beekeepers’ Association to participate in the project. The goal is to ‘help beekeepers secure sustainable honey harvests and provide essential pollination services to the fruit and vegetable industry’, the government said in a statement.

Honey bee colony declines in recent years have reached 10 to 30 per cent in Europe, 30 per cent in the United States, and up to 85 per cent in Middle East, according to a United Nations report on the issue released earlier this year.

Honey bees are critical to global agriculture. They pollinate more than 100 different crops, representing up to US$83 billion in crop value world wide each year and roughly one-third of the human diet. — AFP

Canada seeks to breed a better honey bee

Beekeeping Is Flourishing Inside City Limits

MIKE BARRETT does not have much of a yard at his two-story row house in Astoria, Queens. But that fact has not kept him from his new hobby of beekeeping — he put the hive on his roof. When it was harvest time this fall, he just tied ropes around each of the two honey-filled boxes in the hive, and lowered them to the ground.

Eventually, Mr. Barrett loaded the boxes into his car, took off his white beekeeper suit and set off for a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn. There, along with other members of the New York City beekeeping club, he extracted his honey, eventually lugging home 40 pounds of the stuff.

He was happy with his successful harvest, but he also reaped something he did not expect. “I was surprised how much I really care about the bees,” said Mr. Barrett, 49, a systems administrator for New York University, in reflecting on his inaugural season as a beekeeper. “You start to think about the ways to make their lives better.”

Until last spring, Mr. Barrett would have been breaking the law and risking a $2,000 fine for engaging in his sticky new hobby. But in March, New York City made beekeeping legal, and in so doing it joined a long list of other municipalities, from Denver to Milwaukee to Minneapolis to Salt Lake City, that have also lifted beekeeping bans in the last two years.

OVERSEAS HELP

The H-2A program allows agricultural employers to bring in foreign workers when there is a shortage of U.S. workers.

2008 | H-2A approved

» Bay View Farms: 10
» Bird Feather Hawaii: 25
» Captain Cook Honey: 2
» Hawaiian Queen Co.: 4
» Haleakala Ranch Co.: 1
» Kapapala Ranch: 1
» Kona Cold Lobsters: 8
» Kona Coffee Grounds : 36
» Larry Jefts Farms: 48
» Rincon Family Farms: 2
Total: 137

2008 | Rejected
» Bird Feather Hawaii : 10
» Precy Nazaire/Hawaii Agricultural Labor Services: 50
» Takenaka Nursery: 5

2009 | H2-A approved

» Bird FeatherHawaii: 18
» Captain Cook Honey: 2
» Global Ag Labor: 48
» Haleakala Ranch: 1
» Hawaiian Queen Co.: 6
» Kapapala Ranch: 2
» Kona Coffee Grounds: 28
» Kona Queen Hawaii : 5
» Larry Jefts Farms: 40
» Richard T. Watanabe Farm: 1
» Waikele Farms: 80
Total: 231

2009 | Rejected

» Bird Feather Hawaii: 3
» Global Ag Labor: 12
» Greenwell Farms: 12
» Kona Queen Hawaii: 2
» Palehua Ohana Farmers Cooperative: 8

Source: U.S. Department of Labor’s Foreign Labor Certification Data Center

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/20100913_Local_farms_in_labor_bind.html

Opinion: Plan “Bee”: Hawaii Government Stings Honey Bees | Hawaii 24/7

Posted on October 13, 2009.
Sydney Ross Singer

In case you haven’t heard the buzz, the honey bee in Hawaii is gravely threatened by a newly introduced parasite, the varroa mite, which can wipe out our bee population within a few years, and is spreading across the state.

The question is, should we save the honey bees, or is the mite doing us a favor?

If you ask residents, farmers, and beekeepers, the honey bee is a blessing in Hawaii. They provide delicious honey, they help pollinate all sorts of fruit trees and crops, and they are interesting creatures to raise as a hobby. For most people, our islands would surely be less sweet without honey bees.

On the other hand, if you ask some conservationists who only value “native” species and wish to eradicate introduced ones, the honey bee is an invasive species curse in Hawaii. They compete with native pollinators, and they pollinate alien plant species that are encroaching on native forests. For these people, conservation would best be served by the eradication of the honey bee.

Unfortunately, the Hawaii government holds both of these opinions. And this spells doom for the honey bee.