Food Curious
“One clover, and a bee. And revery.” *
In the mid-1800s, when Emily Dickinson wrote her poem “To Make a Prairie”, the existence of bees in the natural world was taken for granted. A century or so later, I, too, took bees for granted, just as I did snow in New England winters and hurricanes that confined their destruction to coastlines.
I admit that I didn’t particularly notice when, in the 1980s, a parasitic mite called Varroa virtually destroyed the wild honey bee population of the United States when it jumped from its original host—the eastern honey bee—to the western honey bee. Thanks to the efforts of beekeepers, the honey bee population was somewhat restored but then, in 2006, a massive die-off of worker bees decimated the bee population again for reasons that are still debated. Today, honey bees remain threatened. Some farming practices and the aggressive use of pesticides and herbicides continue to cause a worldwide decline in honey bee populations. Yes, most of us still see bees here and there, but those individuals could be one of the 4000 species of bees native to the US—or, if they truly are honey bees—are from unsustainable “feral” hives or on a food flight from a nearby maintained colony. In short, beekeepers have helped keep honey bees from disappearing altogether, but the future of the honey bee is by no means assured.
Should we care? Fewer bees means fewer bee stings, right? And if we run out of honey…well, we can eat jam.
The problem is, we need honey bees for a lot more than honey. As bee scientist Kaira Wagoner, PhD, of the University of North Carolina Greensboro put it, “Bees are critical pollinators of natural ecosystems and crops, contributing between $235 and $577 billion to annual global food production.” According to the US Food and Drug Administration, that means bees are critical to the generation of approximately one-third of our global food supply.
So we should care. Happily beekeepers already do. But before digging into the joys and challenges of keeping bees, a quick brush up on bee basics:
A colony consists of a single queen whose responsibility it is to produce sufficient offspring for the colony to survive, as well as drones (males) and workers (female that are unable to reproduce). Since the life expectancy of drones and workers is about 38 days, and since colonies typically contain tens of thousands of bees, queens need to lay upward of fifteen hundred eggs a day to keep the hive going. A queen undertakes several mating flights in the first few weeks of her life, coupling with 30 to 40 drones to increase genetic diversity. The semen she collects is stored for use throughout her lifetime (generally two-to-three years). It’s her responsibility to determine how many workers or drones are needed by the colony. Eggs she fertilizes develop into female workers, which guard, feed, and groom her, remove waste and dead or ill bees, control the hive temperature, build brood cells for developing larvae and nectar storage, and reduce the moisture content of stored nectar by fanning their wings over it. They are also responsible for collecting the nectar, which is arduous work. On any given day, a worker bee may fly more than three miles and visit between 50 and 100 flowers per trip. A single bee produces about six drops of honey in a lifetime. All these behaviors require communication and cooperation and a lot more words to explain than I have room for here.
Drones have one role in life – fertilizing a queen. Gentlemen, prepare yourselves. This next bit is a bit gruesome.
Mating occurs in midair, and the drone is quite literally torn apart by the act. Mission accomplished, he falls dead from the sky.
When a hive gets overcrowded—usually in spring—the colony prepares for a swarm, a process that involves raising new queens, scouting for a new location, feeding the queen less, and even forcing her to move around more so that she is physically prepared to fly. Initially, queen eggs are no different from worker eggs, but the larvae are feed a more nutritionally rich diet, which allows their reproductive system to develop. In an act reminiscent of one of those terrifying fairytales once read as bedtime stories to children (like me), the first queen born kills her sisters. The old queen decamps for a new hive with half the workers, and the new queen takes over the old hive.
And now on to the wonderful people who raise and study bees.
Beekeepers are classified as commercial, or those for whom bees are their primary source of income; hobbyists, or those who don’t make money from beekeeping; and sideliners, or those who bring in some money, but not an appreciable amount. Migratory beekeepers, who move their hives from location to location to provide pollination services to farmers, are one type of commercial beekeeper. Other commercial beekeepers sell honey and other products produced by bees such as honeycombs and royal jelly.
Indiana beekeeper Jim Berndt started out as a hobbyist but is now a sideliner. A professional geologist, he has an undergraduate degree in wildlife biology and environmental law and a graduate degree in natural resources. Jim grew up around livestock, and when his adult life took him to more urban locations, he missed working with animals until he realized that beekeeping includes everything involved in larger livestock farming, “but with bees, I can have 60,000 head in the back yard.”
Most of Jim’s hives are located at the Teter Organic Farm in Noblesboro, Indiana—not literally his backyard—but even when he’s at work, Jim’s not far from honey bees. With the permission of the owner of the historic building in Indianapolis where his office is located, Jim installed two hives on the roof for a total of about 40,000 bees. He is far from the first to keep bees in a city: Urban beekeeping is a growing trend, with hives showing up on rooftops, in parks, and in backyards.
“Ask five beekeepers a question,” Jim told me early in our conversation, “And you’ll get eight answers.” He was referring to discussion he’d just had on over-wintering bees, but his statement turned out to be prophetic: In response to my question, “What interests you about beekeeping?” Jim effused, “Raising queens and breeding queens, the history of beekeeping, beekeeping practices in other countries, and teaching others about raising bees.” Five answers, and only one beekeeper’s response.
Vermont Beekeeper Bianca Braman was similarly enthusiastic about many aspects of beekeeping, but she came to her passion from a different direction. At age seven, she was fascinated by monarch butterflies, but then her interest in insects went dormant until, as an adult, she bought a book on beekeeping because it seemed “attractive.”
“Then I sort of went off the deep end,” Bianca admits. Next thing she knew, she was attending beekeeper meetings, volunteering for renowned beekeeper Mike Palmer of French Hill Apiaries, sleeping in her car because harvesting honey and bartending didn’t add up to a rent payment, and learning everything she could about honey bees. After spending six years with Mike, Bianca became a partner in Vermont Bees, LLC—a “small, very artisanal” commercial operation with 400 colonies—in 2021.
A particular interest of Bianca’s is controlled breeding and artificial, or instrumental, insemination. Theoretically, controlling genetics allows for the enhancement of (or elimination of) any number of traits—disease resistance, honey production, a high number of offspring, or a relative lack of aggression, for example—but Bianca’s focus is on longevity and survivability. Controlling who a queen mates with is tricky since mating occurs in the wild, but Vermont has a law that gives beekeepers with more than 10 colonies in a yard, or collections of hives, a two-mile radius of protection from other commercial beekeepers. Thus, queen and drones from the same beekeeping operation have a high likelihood of finding each other before encountering a “foreigner”. Bianca tests her bees for disease, uses all organic treatments, and observes their health and behavior for two years in “outyards”, before moving them closer to her best queens.
Unsurprisingly, the process of inseminating a queen bee by hand involves mastering usage of a very specialized tool. “Then,” Bianca explains, “you choose drones, harvest them, bring them home, pop their abdomen, extract the genitalia, use a syringe with tubing to harvest semen, and then inseminate the queen, which has been sedated with carbon dioxide.” She uses only queens she has raised herself or purchased from a reputable breeder to control for the qualities she wants. This past summer, Bianca sold a few inseminated queens for a few hundred dollars each; an open-mated queen may sell for about $45, but an inseminated queen can sell for upward of $1000.
Despite the education, support, and care beekeepers provide their colonies, high death rates are still common. “We expect a certain amount of bee death,” Kaira, the bee scientist, says. “Typically, beekeepers are okay with 15% loss, but in the US, we’ve seen annual losses over 40%.” Jim claims that 80 percent of hive loss is due to the Varroa mite, a statistic that Kaira says is probably accurate since Varroa continues to be a significant threat, particularly for beekeepers who don’t want to rely on chemical pesticides. Last year, in a prize-winning essay published in Science, Kaira outlined a new approach to protecting colonies from Varroa that relies on understanding of honeybee hygienic practices. Ordinarily, adult bees patrol the brood nest and remove infected brood, like those harboring Varroa. These adults are alerted to infected brood by some sort of signal, but the chemistry of this signal was unknown. Some colonies are better at this type of detection than others, but scientists didn’t know why.
Kaira and members of her lab were able to identify small changes in the chemical signals of unhealthy brood when compared to healthy brood. They then had these chemical compounds synthesized and combined into a mixture of pheromones called UBeeO. Applying UBeeO to a small test area within the colony and then measuring the hygienic response allows beekeepers to determine how good a colony is at detecting and removing unhealthy brood. This approach enables beekeepers to identify Varroa susceptible colonies earlier and to breed for this trait.
So there’s a breakthrough in one of the threats to the honeybee, what about other threats?
“We are definitely dependent on weather,” Jim says. “But the topic of how climate change affects the bees is under addressed.”
Kaira delineates the threats more clearly. “Pesticides,” she says. “Loss of forage and habitat in natural ecosystems is a problem for all pollinators. Range shifts in insects. Changes in the timing and duration of plant flowering. New flowers coming into an area and others disappearing.”
Then she adds a very sobering example of the impact of climate change: the loss of a family of four—including betrothed beekeepers Knox Petrucci and Alison Wisely, and Alison’s sons ages seven and nine—in the flood waters of Helene.
Should we care about the impact of climate change on our world?
I would say we have to.
This essay is in honor of the hundreds of thousands of human lives lost worldwide each year as a result of climate change.
You can now preorder my forthcoming climate novel, Little Great Island (Sibylline Press, May 6, 2025). Check out my website for more information katewoodworth.com.
*from “To Make a Prairie” by Emily Dickinson
Kaira Wagoner, PhD, a biologist at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, studies honey bee chemical communication. Her lab’s recent discovery may help reduce a significant threat to a critical pollinator. Photo by: Bert Vanderveen, University of North Carolina Greensboro.