Tag: nutrition

bee health · beekeeping · bees, pollinators, beekeeping, environment · natural cures · nature

Bee Health Around the Globe. China

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In China, people revere bees as symbols of good luck and prosperity. Bees appear in art and on clothing.

China still leads the world in honey production, and has more than eight million managed colonies. Plus, the country boasts an enviable diversity of managed and wild honeybee species.

But in some rural parts of China, bees have disappeared. Uncontrolled use of pesticides since the 1980s has wiped them out.   

In Southern Szechuan Province, where pear orchards carpet hillsides and produce fruit for the entire country, no bees showed up to pollinate trees in 2013. Farmers reported this to the government. Beijing insisted that the farmers pollinate the crops by hand.

Today, humans do the work bees once did, and it is a laborious undertaking. A worker painstakingly collects pollen and sets it to dry for two days. Then, using a stick of bamboo and chicken feathers to imitate the body of a bee, the worker touches a blossom. A person can pollinate 30 or fewer trees in a day, whereas a hive of bees can pollinate up to three million flowers in that same time.

It isn’t just pear farmers who have learned to hand-pollinate. Apple, cherry, and other fruit growers also use people to pollinate. Farmers have proven adept at doing the work of bees, hard as it is, but some predict this may not be sustainable. As China makes economic strides, young people move to the cities. Some predict that in 10 to 20 years, farmers may not be able to find laborers to hand-pollinate crops.   

Asian bees have coevolved with the varroa mite, the parasite that has proved so destructive to bees in the U.S. and Europe, and have adjusted to it. But other diseases have jumped national borders and threaten Asian colonies. With its unparalleled diversity of managed and wild honeybee species, a further decline of bees in China would be felt globally.

China continues to use pesticides in large amounts. Farmers are told to restrict pesticide use when crops are blossoming, but some beekeepers find they must move their hives to the forests to try to shield them from heavy spraying.

Gloomy predictions say that once bees have been wiped out in an area, repopulation is unlikely.

Better to cherish and save colonies before that occurs.   

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Bee Health Around the Globe-Africa

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With bee populations in decline in the U.S., it is natural to wonder how bees are doing around the globe. How about in Africa?

In contrast to the docile European honeybees we raise in the U.S., honey bees in Africa generally live in tree cavities or on the ground, not in manmade hives. Africa has hundreds of millions of colonies.

 African beekeepers have little reason to establish hives near their houses. African bees can be highly aggressive, and special knowledge and precautions are needed to handle them.

When antiapartheid leader Nelson Mandela was still alive, he one day stepped out of the shower at his South African home into a swarm of attacking honeybees. The bees stung repeatedly, and Mandela had to run for cover.

Traditional healers speculated that the ancestors were expressing disapproval. In Xhosa tradition, an encounter with tranquil bees signifies ancestor approval; a visit from angry bees means ancestor displeasure.  

The incident made international news and reinforced the reputation of African bees as nasty critters.    

In the last 20 years, bee researchers from other continents, grappling with the problem of shrinking bee populations, started studying bees in Africa. Honeybee populations in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya and Benin are strong.  

Diseases, either native or imported, exist in colonies, but don’t seem to generate widespread mortality. Some researchers wonder whether our industrial method of beekeeping contributes to the bee crisis. Removing bees from their natural setting and confining them in hives may have weakened them.  

Despite the generally positive situation on the African continent, some decline in populations have been observed. In parts of Madagascar, Kenya. and South Africa, colonies have succumbed to the dreaded varroa mite that plagues U.S. honeybees. And some beekeepers are having more trouble trapping wild swarms to build their stocks.

Killer (African) bees arrived in South America in the 1950s and started migrating north. By the 1990s, they had reached Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and have now spread to other Southern states.

A university study in Arizona said that today, 100 percent of Arizona’s wild bee colonies are Africanized, a fact people should know. Bees make their home in holes, walls, trees and junk piles. They are more easily provoked, but look almost identical to our easygoing Italian and Carniolan breeds.

Africanized bees in the U.S. led some warm-climate municipalities to prohibit backyard beekeeping. Beekeepers in those climates, who are trying to maintain non-Africanized colonies, face a steep, uphill battle.   

Some think inbreeding with the hardier African bees may strengthen our domestic genetics. But others warn that trading bees all over the world has negative consequences, not just for people. Bees end up in environments with diseases they have no immunity against. And aggressive breeds displace docile ones.   

We who live in northern states hope Africanized bees won’t come our way due to a warming climate.

Yet, because we depend on honeybees, it is comforting to know that somewhere in the world colonies thrive. If, through selective breeding, the African bee could contribute its hardiness while surrendering its bad temper, that could be a boon. Bees thriving without the intervention of humans is the Holy Grail for scientists and beekeepers.

Scientists hope that Africa shields its healthy colonies from further invading disease.  

bees, pollinators, beekeeping, environment · natural cures · nature

Honey. Weapon of War?

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We use honey as a term of endearment. When we chat with a child at the grocery store, we call them “Honey.” “It’s your birthday? Happy birthday, Honey.”

When our hair turns gray, clerks at the grocery store call us “Honey.” “Find everything okay, Honey?” (I hate this. I am not eight.)

We regard the wonder food that bees manufacture as dependably sweet and healthful. But at least once in history, an ancient army used toxic or “mad” honey to disable enemy troops and win a battle. A foretaste of chemical warfare.

Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist and philosopher, raved about the excellent honey of the Mediterranean region. He also wrote about “mad” honey, which came from nectar collected from a toxic species of rhododendron. Consuming a dose of it caused blurred vision, dizziness, hallucinations, nausea, numbness, fainting and seizures. In Turkey, this honey bore the name “crazy honey.”

Rhododendron ponticum grew in abundance in Turkey on the coast of the Black Sea. Local bees collected much of their nectar from the dense concentration of those plants. It did not appear to harm the bees.

King Mithridates became aware of toxic honey’s potential when his own Greek soldiers found and ate it and suffered horrible effects. Some went out of their heads. But they didn’t die.

The King schemed to use the honey against enemy soldiers. He laid toxic honeycomb along a roadway that invading Roman soldiers would travel. The Romans saw the honeycomb as a gift from the gods, and eagerly consumed it. The honey made them horribly sick and disoriented, and the Greek soldiers moved in and killed them. It is ironic and sad to think of honey, valued for its healthful properties throughout the world, making soldiers so ill they lost their lives.  

This toxic variety of rhododendron bush has spread to the British Isles, but a program is in place to eradicate it. It appears that bumble bees pollinate the plant, and local honey bees avoid it.

We cannot let this account of bad honey taint our appreciation for how often honey has benefitted soldiers. Russians used honey in WW I to prevent infections in wounds and assist in healing. During the U.S. Civil War, medics on both sides relied on honey because of a scarcity of salves and ointments. Those are famous cases, but we can assume that warriors from the earliest times and in the most remote places have relied on nourishing honey for use, internally and externally.