Imagine one-third of all of our food production being severely impeded, if not completely destroyed. In the face of colony collapse disorder, north American beekeepers knew this scenario was not just a scary idea, but a true reality. Greene County beekeeper, Mike Meyer, explained, one-third of all plants are directly impacted, and another third is indirectly impacted by honeybee pollination. Bee pollination is responsible for $15 billion in added crop value, particularly for specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits and vegetables. In southwest Missouri, they’re pollinating alfalfa, clover, soybeans and other forages and crops.
“If this disorder gets the upper hand of us the whole industry’s going to go down the tube,” Meyer warned. So, he and other beekeepers have set out to do something about it.
Colony collapse disorder (CCD), sometimes also known as honey bee depopulation syndrome, was reported first in October 2006. According to the USDA, some beekeepers noted losses as great as 30 to 90 percent of their hives.
Meyer explained, “During certain times of the year, most commonly in the late fall, they’d find no bees in the hive. The bees had left a whole box or two boxes of honey, and sometimes the whole brood. Did a big vacuum cleaner come suck them out overnight? Turns out from what we know now, scientists found as many as six things potentially causing the bees’ deaths, but a combination of two main things.
“There is a new microsporidion, a bug, like we get a flu bug, nosema ceranae, which has the ability to produce spores. This came over from another species of bee, a type of bee out of southeast Asia. It’s a minor thing there, because they’ve had it for decades or centuries. They’re finding between lab and hive experiments, this thing can multiply in the midgut of the bee, multiply and spread. It’d be like getting dysentery, pneumonia, a stomach flu and maybe two or three other diseases all at once. It takes their immune system and knocks it down to nothing, so that things like various viruses that the bees are subjected to normally, they become vulnerable to these things,” Meyer said.
And as to a cure or a treatment for the bees? “Scientists and the chemical companies approved a type of antibiotic, Fumagillon, which also lowered the bees immune system. It seemed to work in most cases, but there were notable failures.” Meyer explained scientists are still arguing as to exactly what CCD is, and they have no great solutions, and the bees are dying en masse.
“So now the story gets really interesting to me,” Meyer smiled. “Bob Noel, a beekeeper out of Maryland, has a product he created called Honey-B-Healthy. Through his own research, he has seen that bees like emulsified oils of spearmint and lemon grass. It’s similar to one of the scents they give off, so it calms them. The spearmint can actually kill bacteria, and makes the honeybees livelier and stronger. His formula for years was to give the bees a small amount of his product, and they seemed to be healthier, but it wasn’t a big thing.
A large beekeeper wintering in Texas was using Honey-B-Healthy in the regular dosage and it didn’t work – he was losing colonies of bees. “He sees his whole livelihood going down the drain, and in a last-ditch effort, he dumped the Honey-B-Healthy into a huge container, and dumped it in his hives. And, then, he saw the bees coming back to health again. So Bob and I, after finding that, made some phone calls to him and determined what proportion he’d dumped in. What we came up with was a 4:1 ratio of what had previously been used. Bob and I and other beekeepers did other experiments to make sure we weren’t harming the bees with the large doses. After several months it didn’t seem like it was harming the bees,” Meyer said.
The way Honey-B-Healthy works to cure entire colonies of bees isn’t complex, Meyer said. “Bees are simple creatures, they have a feed response – they’ll look at it, taste it, say this tastes good – and if you make a mess, they have the housekeeping response. When the substance was dumped into the hive, every bee in the hive was recruited to clean the mess up, to clean each other up.”
Dr. Jeff Pettis, head of the USDA bee research labs, did warn Meyer and Hart that at a 4:1 dosage, they were close to the lethal dose. “But beekeepers were seeing results, so we remained at the 4:1 dosage. There’s an old farmer saying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Meyer said.
“Two years ago I got CCD. I wasn’t using this method, and it hit me in the fall and I lost 75 percent of the bees. Last year was 25 percent and this year we hope to get it down to 10 percent,” said Meyer, who is an avid user of Honey-B-Healthy, said.
Meyer explained the beekeepers don’t use the Honey-B-Healthy method before the honey flow or after the honey flow. “What we use is all organic, though,” he explained. So the honey isn’t affected in the process. The largest beekeeper in the U.S. is using the Honey-B-Healthy product on his hives. He applies seven times per year.
Mike Meyer himself is in the top five of Missouri beekeepers. “I’m still recovering. I’m a small commercial producer on the national scale. There’s guys now that have 15,000 to 20,000 bee colonies, with each colony at 70,000 bees each. A large beekeeper used to be 2,500, now, just like all of agriculture, the large ones have gotten bigger – the largest in the United States has 80,000 hives.”
For more information on Colony Collapse Disorder, visit www.ozarksfn.com.
