Good-bye to the Bees

Adam started beekeeping on a May day in 2010, nearly 8 years ago. An elderly friend offered us his dilapidated beehive at his lake home, if we were willing to go get it. We did.

Bee-keeping was a learning curve. We lost those bees. We bought more and lost them over the winter too. But the third time we bought bees, they survived for years. We got them from the "Fat Bee Man" in rural north Georgia.

We moved a few times, carting those bees along with us, finally lighting here in coastal North Carolina - a rural county with lots of farmland and water. Perfect for bees, right? When we moved to our house on Midyette Street in Oriental, we had lost a hive and had only 2 hives left.

They look lonesome, don't they? It may seem odd, but a small town like Oriental, with lots of flowers, yards, ditches, weeds, and a large variety of vegetation, is perfect for bees. The hives thrived. When we moved away from Midyette Street less than 2 years later, we had 8 hives! We did not buy new bees. Adam split the hives and collected our swarms. We were so happy!

If you click over to the link above this photo, it will explain all the numbers.

We moved to the farm in August of 2015. You'd think a lovely farm in a rural North Carolina county would be great for bees, right?

Wrong.

It's hard to look at.

The beekeeper is the same. Adam's good beekeeping practices didn't change. It's the same good small-cell Italian bee genetics. They were healthy when we moved to the farm ... so what happened?

Our neighbors happened.

We don't spray chemicals on our farm at all. The soil was used only for a small horse farm for years before we moved here, so the soil is good -- manure, no chemicals. But around us? We're surrounded by mono-culture, big farms. They spray pesticides on their thousands of acres of corn. The crop dusters fly overhead and the tank trucks and big sprayers ride over the acres.

You may ask, why does that make a difference? It doesn't kill off all the mosquitoes or all the flies. Why does it kill off hives of bees? Because bees gather their food (pollen, nectar) and bring it into their hives, which other insects don't do. Beehives are usually a richly condensed environment of extreme health, which is why products of beehives are used in medicine and cosmetics, and why beeswax is a natural preservative and honey lasts for thousands of years.

But the close, condensed nature of a beehive also works against it, when toxins are concentrated there. When bees gather toxic chemicals over and over (and over and over ... thousands of times each day), and all those bits of toxicity are gathered in a hive, it becomes a killing place. And the bees weaken and die.

We didn't realize it at first. We blamed it on lots of rain. We wondered by hive after hive died off over the two years we've lived here. Big hives slowly died in the course of the summertime, when beehives should be healthy and growing.

It's very sad. We have a lovely farm, contaminated by neighbor farms, and now we can't have bees. Not only have our many hives all died, but Adam will never be able to own bees again, as long as we live here. He wanted to be a beekeeper in retirement. Now that's not possible.

And the farm in question cannot be held responsible. But of course ... they are. There are nations where bees are safe, where the food supply is therefore safe, but not in the U.S. Here, big agri-business rules, and small farmers and beekeepers do not.

So, we have said good-bye to our bees. The last hive is full of wax moths and is being raided out as I type this. I think Adam will burn the boxes on the next burn pile day, and he will mow over the spot by the pine copse. It's a sad day.