All our bees are dead

We first spotted the bee bodies piled up high at the hive entrance on Saturday morning, all of them pointing inwards as if they died struggling in a panicking crowd to get back inside. When I helped my beloved to lift the lid off the hive, a terrible sight greeted us inside. Our entire bee colony was dead. No survivors. The last time we saw live bees on cleansing flights was at the very beginning of the new year. Until we send off a sample of fifty or so dead bees for analysis, which is to determine why they died, we can only guess as to what happened.

It’s my beloved who is the beekeeper in our house. He was and remains devastated. Unless you’re a beekeeper yourself or live with one you’ve no idea just how much work and love goes into building a colony, nurturing it, making sure it has food for the winter, keeping pests under control. Thousands of little lives gone. A ghost hive. It’s just horrible.

The best theory we have right now is that the extreme cold snap, the longest since records began and which saw local temperatures at one point plunge to -13C, caught the colony by surprise. It looks like the weather turned quickly and that’s why so many bees died desperately trying to get back into the hive. Those that were already inside or made it back in would have found their refuge turned into a freezer.

Bees can only do so much to keep themselves warm. In a normal winter this is more than enough. It has not been a normal winter.

It certainly wasn’t the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder that killed our bees, which sees hives completely abandoned with no bodies to be found. We found nothing to suggest pests such as the varroa mite were responsible, alhough they were present but not in overwhelming numbers because one of the jobs of the beekeeper is to keep them under control. Only testing will tell us for certain whether it was climate or disease but our money’s on climate. The weather in the UK has been at times extreme, often astonishingly awful, for three years now. The year before we got our bees, 2007, was a dreadfully wet summer; 2008, it was the most apocalyptically wet summer on record; 2009, it was a so-so summer, hardly worthy of the name, followed by what has so far been a most terrible winter. If these years had involved good summers and normal winters, our bees could have built up a strong, large colony. They never got the chance.

Extremes of weather have long been predicted because of climate change. Bees are the canaries in the coal mine. They are in trouble because of climate change, air pollution and the widespread use of insecticides, weed-killers and vast areas being turned over to monoculture crop production which wipes out native flora and fauna.

As the honey bee is now endangered, this should be of concern to everyone. It isn’t just about the honey. It’s about all the flowers, trees and vegetables. Without bees doing the work they do, entire plant species would become extinct within the space of a year and the only way for some small number to be prioritised for survival would be by humans undertaking manual pollination, flower by flower, with brushes. This is already done in some parts of the world where bees have disappeared. Even the most patient and attentive human being can’t do the job a fraction as well as bees can. If bees vanish altogether it is said that humanity would be at real risk of becoming extinct as well, and quickly, well within a decade. Bear in mind, too, that a host of other life on earth depends on pollination taking place as well and those animals and insects are predated upon by other animals and insects, so if one lot go the way of the dinosaur many others follow after. Like a big messy ball of string unraveling until you’ve got nothing left. That’s co-dependency. That’s life.

One of the ways people can help is by training to become beekeepers, to become hive custodians. And so when those of us who actively engage with the fight to save these incredible life-enabling insects come across a hive full of dead bees, it’s beyond my ability to describe the depression that kicks in as a consequence. It’s not cheap to join the fight, either. Training is not free, hives are costly and queen bees and nurse bees to start a new colony are not cheap.

The UK government is happy to bail out banks because our politicians tell us they do it for our economic survival but there are no grants or other financial incentives to help people become beekeepers. Even the amount put into researching the causes of bee population decline is insignificant small change compared to how much has been given to bankers. More money is spent every day on emptying our dustbins and on street lighting than on finding ways to save the bees. Ultimately, only beekeepers help other beekeepers and train new people. There are inevitably costs involved, and time must be accounted for.

Where equipment is concerned, hives and tools, you’d think an influx of new beekeepers might bring prices down but we live in a capitalist society in which greater demand seems to often encourage escalating, not lower, prices as suppliers seek to increase their profits year on year. There is great disparity in prices, though, and as with all things it pays to shop around. Perhaps by more of us doing that the greediest suppliers will then find their profits down, not up. As much as possible, if they have the DIY skills, beekeepers build their own hives to keep costs down.

Bees are more important than banks. Our economies can rise and fall, empires and civilisations can vanish into history, but without bees the food web will fall apart.

So what do we do in our garden now we’ve lost our first-ever colony? Today we need to undertake the sad task of cleaning the hive. We prepare the required sample of dead bees for posting, we burn all the remaining corpses and the frames on which the honey was made and eggs laid, we blow-torch the interior of the hive to eradicate any and all trace of pests and disease. It will be a mournful job to undertake all these tasks but it is best to get it over with as quickly as possible. Delay only extends the mourning period and yes, we are grieving for these wonderful industrious creatures. They, along with the chickens, made our garden come alive. At the height of summer a garden filled with gossiping hens and buzzing bees is far more attractive, to us at least, than a chemical-soaked ultra-green lawn and strict lines of border flowers developed to be of no use to bees at all, although not intentionally.

Our bees knew us. Bees seem to recognise people they happen across frequently. I would enjoy seeing them at work and hearing them buzzing in the summer months, and the occasional nosey parker would fly up to me, run a bit of facial recognition and then go away satisfied that “it’s only that human we know, not the one who looks after us, the other one doing his garden stuff, we’re okay”. They had moods good and bad, and the beekeeper especially was able to discern just how cranky they’d get with too many runs of persistently horrible weather when they wanted to get outside and knew important work had to be done.

After the burning we wait a while. It is too early in the year to start a new colony. Our friend @amethystdragon started as a beekeeper in 2007 and lost her own first-ever colony in 2008. She knows how we feel. This year she is wanting to cut down on the number of hives she looks after but she, too, fears for the winter survival of her bees. She suspects two, maybe even three, of her four colonies may have gone the same way as our one and probably, if we’re right about the impact of the weather, for the same reason. She has kindly offered to provide us with another nucleus if she is able to produce one for us. She may not have enough bees left to do that. A nucleus is what we call the cluster of queen bee and nurses I mentioned above, a starter kit if you will. It was @amethystdragon who gifted my beloved with his first nucleus for his birthday in 2008. I bought him his beekeeping outfit and our parents went halves on buying him his first hive.

The entire enterprise for us was started with the generosity and love of others, a collaborative effort. Is it any wonder we’re heart-broken? My own view—and I am not the beekeeper who has to decide, I’d like to learn but the cost of training is beyond me for the time being—is that we are best getting over this and starting again from scratch as soon as we are able. Not doing so would be a waste of an excellent, attentive and kind, beekeeper in the form of my beloved, at a time when the world needs more taking up the so-called hobby, not less. If our dead bees had been able to talk, they’d have said, should anything happen to them, they’d like us to give a home to another colony.

Non-commercial beekeeping isn’t a hobby, though. The work is far too important to call it a hobby. You won’t find beekeepers sitting on high chairs next to swimming pools waiting to rescue the drowning but they are life-guards just the same. We should all be grateful for the work they do, and for the work bees do. And we should all be concerned when we hear of bees dying, and do what we can to help where we are able.

Thank you for reading today’s entry.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Beekeepers lose one fifth of hives (telegraph.co.uk)
• Hive and Seek: Where Have the Honeybees Gone? (scientificamerican.com)
• Hi honey I’m home – the new hobby that’s creating a buzz in Britain (guardian.co.uk)
• Bee numbers in England fell by more than half over the last 20 years (telegraph.co.uk)

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