Our Environment, Animal Tips & the Great Outdoors

Pollination is vital to our ecosystem. Bees and other pollinators work hard, ensuring food security and nutrition and maintaining biodiversity for plants, humans, and the pollinators themselves. 

Just how dependent is our food system on pollinators?

Pollinators are essential to the production of many fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, nearly 75 percent of all crops around the world depend on pollinating insects. “The diversity of food available is largely owed to animal pollinators,” the FAO writes. 

Foods with a high dependency – a yield reduction of 40 percent to 90 percent without pollinators – include fruits such as apples, apricots, blueberries, peaches, raspberries; nuts including almonds, cashews, and kola nuts; and avocados. Foods with an essential dependency on pollinators – with a yield reduction greater than 90 percent without pollinators – include fruits such as kiwi, melons, pumpkins, and watermelons; cocoa beans; Brazil nuts; and vanilla.

But alarmingly, in a number of regions across the globe, pollination services are showing declining trends. “In the past, this service was provided by nature at no apparent cost,” the FAO writes. “As farm fields have become larger, agricultural practices have also changed, focusing on a narrower list of crops and increasing the use of pesticides. Mounting evidence points to these factors as causes of the potentially serious decline in populations of pollinators. The decline is likely to impact the production and costs of vitamin-rich crops such as fruits and vegetables, leading to increasingly unbalanced diets and health problems.” 

If honey bees were to go extinct, it would have unprecedented effects on our human diet and would likely cause an agricultural crisis at a level that we’ve never seen before. Fruit and vegetable prices would skyrocket, and some goods would disappear completely. 

Apples, avocados, onions, and strawberries are a handful of crops that rely heavily on bees for pollination. If there were no bees or other pollinators to pollinate crops, then it would fall on the farmers to do it by hand, which would not only be incredibly time-consuming, but also simply unsustainable. 

Honey bee colony losses & colony collapse disorder

An article titled “A World Without Bees? Here’s What Happens If Bees Go Extinct,” from the Natural Resources Defense Council, states that a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture found that “Honey bee losses in managed colonies – the kind that beekeepers rent out to farmers – hit 42 percent this year.” 

This number is concerning because while population losses below 18.7 percent are sustainable, if beekeepers lose more of the population, then the entire colony could be in trouble. From the same study, the USDA found that “Two-thirds of beekeepers reported losses above the threshold, suggesting that the pollination industry is in trouble.” 

Gino Robustelli, local beekeeping legend, manages the bee hives at Harney & Sons’ tea factory – which help pollinate their hemp fields – and the honey bee program at Silo Ridge in Amenia, NY, and installs bee hives for folks looking to dive into beekeeping themselves. 

Gino has been practicing beekeeping in the Hudson Valley area for over 40 years, so he’s certainly seen his fair share of changes in bee trends. In fact, Gino shared that at the end of February, many beekeepers he knows and works closely with in Dutchess County experienced a seemingly random loss of bees. 

The likely cause of these losses is colony collapse disorder, which, according to the EPA, is a phenomenon wherein the majority of worker bees within a colony disappear, leaving behind the queen, young bees, and food stores. 

The exact causes of colony collapse disorder are, frustratingly enough, still unknown. However, a variety of factors are believed to contribute to the disorder, including the exposure to pesticides and herbicides, parasites and diseases, malnutrition via a lack of access to diverse and nutritious food sources, stress factors including transportation, overcrowding, and poor beekeeping practices, and extreme fluctuations in weather. 

“A lot of beekeepers in this area are now essentially back to square one. We don’t know exactly why it happens, but sometimes the bees just flee the hive and don’t come back,” Gino said. “Bees are one of the greatest navigators in the world. They rely on the position of the sun to navigate, so if there’s no sun, sometimes they’ll wander because they can’t find their way back to the hive and eventually, they’ll die.” 

Climate change challenges & protecting bees from extreme weather fluctuations

A recent study titled, “Warmer autumns and winters could reduce honey bee overwintering survival with potential risks for pollination services,” published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that longer, warmer autumns raises the likelihood of colony collapse in the spring. While the study focused on the Pacific Northwest, it still holds implications for bees across the different climates in the United States. 

“Results indicate that expanding geographic areas will have warmer autumns and winters, extending honey bee flight times,” the study states. “Our simulations support the hypothesis that late-season flight alters the overwintering colony age structure, skews the population towards older bees, and leads to greater risks of colony failure in the spring. Management intervention by moving colonies to cold storage facilities for overwintering has the potential to reduce honey bee colony losses.” 

The process of overwintering bees can include ensuring that they have a strong, healthy colony with a good queen and ample honey stores within the hive, protecting them from extreme temperature fluctuations by wrapping the hive, monitoring for pests, and minimizing hive disturbances during the winter months. 

Why is overwintering bees important? Simply put, it keeps them safe from extreme weather changes and temperature fluctuations, as bees are sensitive to the cold. Some wild bees will survive the winter months by hibernating, but others die at the start of the winter season if not protected. For domestic bees, they need a little extra help to protect their colony, which is where overwintering the hives comes in.

“However, critical gaps remain in how to optimize winter management strategies to improve the survival of overwintering colonies in different locations and conditions. It is imperative that we bridge the gaps to sustain honey bees and the beekeeping industry and ensure food and nutritional security,” the Scientific Reports study states. 

Gino encloses his hives using two inches of foam all around the hive box. He notes that while some people choose to wrap their hives, he hasn’t had much success with that method since plastic wrap can sweat and then cause moisture within the hive, which ultimately can harm the bees. 

In the spring, Gino ensures that temperatures are going to be consistently warm and the threat of frost has passed before unwrapping the hives and reacclimating the bees to the environment. Generally speaking, the “cluster point” – or the temperature in which bees will cluster together in order to keep warm – is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Disturbing the bee cluster too early in the season when it’s not warm enough can stress the colony and put it at risk. 

The upcoming bee season 

Gino started doing bee hive installations in Dutchess County in the 1990s, and now, he spends a lot of time educating his clients prior to installation. First, he’ll bring prospective beekeepers to Silo Ridge or Harney, where he works with the hives so that they can get firsthand experience taking care of the bees and seeing how the hives operate. Then, he works closely with the prospective beekeepers to ensure they understand how the hives function and how to take care of the bees. He visits with his clients daily for a week following the installation to see how they’re faring, then follows up once per month after. 

“I make myself very available so people don’t get discouraged,” he explained. “But keeping bees changes people’s personalities, truly. It’s an amazing thing.” 

Gino gets many of his hives from other beekeepers who don’t want to do it anymore. Many of the hives come from nearby either in Dutchess or Orange counties, but he occasionally has to travel further to pick them up. Additionally, Gino also “domesticates” and manages wild bees through a process of capturing the wild bee colonies with a bee vacuum and placing them into a beehive box, which he then manages the same way he does with his other hives. 

The main thing that Gino is aware of when capturing wild bees is ensuring that the queen is also vacuumed into the beehive box, otherwise he has to reacclimate the colony to a new queen. On some occasions, when introducing a new queen to a bee colony, the bees will reject the queen. This can happen if a new queen is introduced to a hive that is not truly queenless or if the new queen has a scent that the worker bees don’t recognize as their own. This can lead to the worker bees attacking and killing the new queen.

Honey bees only have an average lifespan of six weeks, but during that time, Gino says they lay eggs every day, leave the hive to forage for food, and complete other daily “chores” within the colony. When bees leave the hive to forage, they go in search of pollen and nectar, both of which are found in flowers. Gino attributes the decline in pollinator populations in part to the lack of flowers being planted in the area and the increase in popularity of greenscapes. 

“Many people aren’t growing flowers the way they used to. There are a lot of monoculture landscapes and greenscapes in this area, and the problem with that is that foraging is then limited for bees. If you limit their food, you kill them.”

Despite the challenges that are looming, Gino is still excited for the upcoming season. “With all of the losses, we’re going to have to work hard to establish the colonies, but I think it will be a good season. I’m optimistic.” •

If you’re interested in learning more about beekeeping, contact Gino Robustelli via email at grobustelli@gmail.com.