It Will Bee Okay: How to preserve our way of life by saving bees

Our future livelihood is on the line as bees continue to die and pollination of our crops dwindles.

Story by MEGAN CAMPBELL | Photos by LINCOLN HUMPHRY & HARRISON AMELANG

The sound of bees amid the trees in the forest surrounding a garden. Flowers are blooming; the sun is out. Spring has begun.

Tucked away in the woods between Fairhaven Complex and Buchanan Towers sits the Outback Farm, where resident beekeeper Michael Jaross tends to his collection of beehives, called an apiary. In his full-body bee suit he resembles an astronaut, protected from the elements but ever curious as to what he may find. As the bees emerge from the hives after a long, rainy winter, he stays close to care for them.

The bees spend most of their time in and around the apiary, helping to create a more fertile environment for plants and food growing nearby.

But safe spaces for bees are increasingly rare these days as colonies face collapse, mistreatment by corporations and viruses that threaten to wipe out the bee population entirely.

The Bees are Dying

In the almost 12 years since beekeepers first noticed Colony Collapse Disorder, a condition where the majority of worker bees disappear or die, no cause has been found. The USDA and the EPA are researching pesticide effects on pollinators as well as solutions, but according to Michael, around 50 percent of hives continue to die as the loss of workers increases.

Commercial beekeeping is exploitative of bees for the use of honey production and may actually be harming the environment more through cross-country honey distribution. Bees also need to keep their honey as food and through the loss of the colonies, commercial beekeepers have been pushing bees outside their normal radius.

“So, 30 years ago, this mite came along from Southeast Asia, the verroa destructor. Nobody knew what to do about it because there’s no resistance. Eventually clever people learned how to deal with that, but we are right on the borderline, just being able to maintain,” Jaross said.

Verroa mites, which infect the whole colony by sucking out the bee’s blood are dangerous because although it attacks only a handful of hive members, it’s enough to weaken and wipe the entire colony. One more disease or parasite could destroy the entire beekeeping world.

People who aren’t beekeepers don’t understand the care that hives require or how much bees do for the sake of the environment.

Honeybees need extra help to fight off these diseases for them to continue to pollinate our crops. They can’t feel the verroa mites on their skin until it is too late, and without worker bees they stand no chance because they need to eat honey to survive.

“I feel like more of a mite keeper than a beekeeper,” Jaross said with a laugh. “Before these mites came in the ’80s, beekeepers could spend more time with the bees and making money. Now we are trying to keep them alive, especially hobby beekeepers, because these hives don’t make much money.”

The Good of the Hive

Beekeeping is an accessible, yet expensive hobby for those in western Washington who have some extra time. As a sustainable community in Bellingham, we pride ourselves on being able to buy local and support farmers and producers in an eco-friendly way.

One hundred miles away in British Columbia, Canada, Cameron Nielsen is working toward a similar goal: saving the bees through knowledge and community.

After a failed stint as a beekeeper in high school, he set out to connect the world through something we all rely on, bees. A student at Quest College in BC, Cameron studies beekeeping and art, specifically looking at how he can connect the two and make a real difference.

Through research, he found out about Matthew Willey, a North Carolina based artist who happened to be creating art based on bees. His project, The Good of the Hive is a collection of hand painted bee murals around the world to connect bees.

Willey’s commitment to paint 50,000 bees led him to Seattle where he rented a car and drove straight up to see Nielsen. They began producing a web series that slowly evolved into a documentary.

“I wanted to use art as a way to connect people together and bees are a thing we all rely on for food and clean air through plants,” Nielsen said.

With this project they are planning to share it with bigger studios and connections through the United Nations to help beekeepers all over the world and connect people on a higher level using bees and their contributions to humanity.

Projects like these serve as a way to focus more within our own communities and support bees through local honey production.

The Future of Beekeeping

Imagine a world where we have lost two-thirds of the food we currently consume. Coffee and berries are gone. Flowers are expensive and hard to come by. A single apple costs over $15.

As we worry about global warming and other environmental disasters, this seems like an issue for the future, but our hourglass is quickly running out.

The USDA estimates that honeybees provide U.S. farmers with $11 billion-to-$15 billion in work each year. Honey as well would be almost obsolete as we lose the one thing we need to produce it, the bees themselves.

Freshman Amanda Mai realized she needed to do something to help when she began studying the issue in high school.

“I found that the more and more I got into it, I gotta do something, they’re dying! There are a lot of ways you can help. But beekeeping is really the heart of it, getting in there,” she said, barely containing her excitement.

As she followed the issue of colony collapse, Mai started thinking of things she could do before she got her own hive. Jaross taught her about what he called “guerrilla planting,” where a person carries around seeds in their pocket to toss into grassy areas. This small effort is an attempt to bring more flowers into the region and therefore attract more bees which we can care for.

With her beekeeping goals in mind, Mai has set her sights on an Environmental Policy degree which would allow her to work closely with decisions like the Clean Air Act which would then affect the well-being of wildlife like bees.

“I feel like the way to really, really fix things is through policy change. People really gotta stop spraying terrible pesticides on all our food and like killing everyone.” Mai said, angrily waving her hands in the air, she sighs dejectedly because like most beekeepers, she fears a future without bees.

The forms of beekeeping that are used around the world today have been around for hundreds of years, being tweaked here and there when necessary. A new beekeeper would need to purchase or build a starter hive and acquire a box of bees with a queen. Queens should be bred each year and a beekeeper is responsible for harvesting honey and providing extra food supplements for the winter months. To check the bees, the beekeeper needs a bee suit and a smoker with the appropriate fuel, as well as knowing tricks to make the process easier.

The traditional smokers, used to subdue the bees contain black walnut leaves, which have a small effect on the verroa mites, but cleaning the mites completely out of a hive is a several step process. Powdered sugar is a major cure for the mites and is an easy to spread the cure throughout the hive.

Nielsen explains that alternative beekeeping is also an option for making bees happy. The original hive design we use today was created during the industrial revolution in order to have max honey production.

Bee-centric beekeeping focuses on what the bees like and how they want to live. Nielsen created a hive out of a hollowed-out tree for comfort where they can create their own honey and remain unexploited.

In the Outback Farm, Jarros opens his hives for the first time in weeks. Like an astronaut on mars looking for signs of life, he weaves carefully and softly through the hives, inspecting them for signs of survival, food consumption overall health. All six of his hives are alive and well, 15,000 bees strong each.

Community Support

The bees in the Outback are bred to be gentle and have a lot of contact with people because they are used for teaching purposes in the community to allow people to gain some knowledge about bees and be less scared.

Similar to Willey and Nielsen, Jarros looks to bring the community together through a mutual love of the small things that really matter.

People walk by, curiously observing the process but too scared to come any closer. Two people seem interested in helping, although their greatest asset would be creating a garden for the bees to pollinate.

It’s hard to sit idly by as the something we desperately need disappears, but there are plenty of ways we can do our part to stop hive death. Jarris said college students struggle with this even more because they have little free time to devote to beekeeping or caring for hives, let alone the land to keep the hives on. Inexperience kills bees and people looking to help don’t get the message that beekeeping isn’t easy.

“Plant flowers,” Jaross said. “That’s really it. It sounds like a simple-minded answer but for laypeople, the people who aren’t beekeepers, that’s it.”

Any apartment with a balcony can support flowers, and those with yards can do more by planting gardens or trees for the bees to pollinate.

Honey is also a beneficial for reasons other than sweetening tea. Buying local honey supports local bees and their keepers, but it also contains antioxidants and acts as a natural moisturizer, Mai said. Her skin is smooth and glowing and she completes the look with a smile. Eating local honey rather than commercial honey allows your body to build up an immunity against pollens that may cause allergies.

“It’s expensive. But it’s an investment,” Mai said.

The buzzing continues as we walk further from the farm, into the world. A bee lands on a flower next to you and you think, maybe everything will be all right.