Saving the Honeybees, One Hive at a Time
American Billy Davis has been keeping bees since the 1960s. He has followed the sharp drop in the number ofhoneybees across the country. Two years ago, he setup a non-profit group called the Sustainable HoneybeeProgram. It is developing stronger bees and teachingbeekeepers how to strengthen their bee colonies.
Brenda Kiessling volunteers with SustainableHoneybee Program.
"All the trees that you see came from a seed. That seed was produced by aflower that was pollinated by a bee. If we didn't have the bees, we wouldn'thave the trees, we wouldn't have the flowers, we wouldn't have all the fruitsand vegetables, or one-third of the food that humans need."
Brenda Kiessling is a retired doctor. As a girl, she was raised on a farm. That is when she started watching bees.
"They work as a family. They are very interesting. It's always different. Even ifyou have one colony of bees, when you come out to look at it, you have to 'read it' that day. It's not going to be the same, doing the exactly same thing asyesterday."
Experts say more than one-third of the honeybees are disappearing. Theirdisappearance could have resulted from a combination of things like climatechange, parasites and chemicals used in agriculture.
Virginia beekeeper Billy Davis is working to help honeybees survive.
"We are our salvation, not chemical companies or the professors. They do alot of research that's important, but when the rubber hits the road, it's goingto be the beekeepers."
Americans are trying different ways to fight the loss of bees. They includeusing less chemicals and pesticides. More people are planting bushes andflowers that bees prefer.
The Sustainable Honeybee Program works with bees. The program operatesa farm with more than 50 bee colonies. Alex McLellan is the group's chiefoperations officer.
"The ultimate goal here is to generate bees that are able to take care ofthemselves better. And we proved by not using chemicals here for the lastseven or eight years, that it is possible to keep bees and to have them survivewithout the use of chemical intervention. And that's important."
One tactic to help bee populations stay healthy is “hygienic behavior,” or theability to identify and remove diseased bees from the colony. Brenda Kiesslingsays the beekeepers test for this by using liquid nitrogen.
"We freeze 100 cells. We come back in 24 hours and we test whatpercentage of the cells the workers have removed and gotten rid of. Queenswhich have a hygienic percentage of 95 or 100 percentage are excellent."
Alex McLellan says the group has breeding programs for producing queenbees and sharing them with local beekeepers. He says these 'hygienichoneybees' will be able to recognize threats to the colony, and take correctiveaction.
"We keep records on every single hive, and that compendium of recordsgoes back quite a long time. From that we can look at the genetics and thesurvivability of all our hives. Prior to this year, I think we had a survivability ofsomething over 90 percent, that's far higher than the average nationally."
Richard Whitlow is one of the more than 20 volunteers who work at thefarm.
"Today we are inspecting the hives to make sure there is enough room for thequeens to lay eggs and that they are starting to work on their storage for thewinter. Egg laying is very important so that they can build the hive up, to havea thriving hive going into the winter."
Training volunteers is only the first step. The next steps are up to them, whenthey go home, to use what they learned and share with their neighbors.
I’m Marsha James.
VOA’s Faiza Elmasry reported this story from Purcellville, Virginia. Marsha James adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.