The number one thing that is talked about a lot now is just the loss of habitat uh and
it's it's sort of the combination of lost nesting sites for the native pollinators which
has reduced their numbers and the other thing is just a lack of forage meaning flowers in
the case of bees it's a loss of flowers in sufficient numbers to uh to keep to keep large
populations of of uh uh of bees now where we are in western Massachusetts uh we still
have a lot of native species and they're in good they're good they're in good shape uh
we do surveys all the time when we do apple pollination in the Spring and I will typically
count fifteen or twenty five different insects on apple trees pollinating most of which are
are with the exception of the honey bees most of them are are native species and coming
off a mild winter like we just did uh the trees had plenty of native species now you
go to the Cranberry growers in the eastern part of the state and they're struggling with
having enough pollination of the cranberries uh the lack of forage out west uh there was
actually a discussion at the Eastern Agricultural Society last week where some of the commercial
uh beekeepers were talking about the need they they'll eventually come a time when beekeepers
will have to rent space to put their bees a in prime locations because there's so little
of it left and it's hard to imagine in this whole country that that would be a problem
but it's but the agriculture has changed a we we plant what we call fence post to fence
post so we leave no unkept areas uh that are suitable for native bees to live uh we don't
we uh use lots of herbicides to get rid of weeds in crops so there's no weed plants to
feed these uh bees and that's not just a U.S. problem that's something that we're seeing
throughout the world uh as we as our populations increase we have sort of manicured the planet
and kind of put things in our own our own uh image as we would like it and and that's
taking away weeds and all these natural plants that actually have a purpose of feeding wild
life so the habitat and forage is the first thing Western Mass. we have Black Bears Black
Bears are a huge problem out here everybody has to put up electric fences to keep 'em
out uh and uh the other things that we have are mites Varroa Mites which are a parasitic
mite uh probably yhe number one pest that that bees have and that's also a world problem
uh but we are seeing we've identified bees that actually have inheritable traits that
they will remove the mites from each other and they will remove mites that are in the
brood that's not not yet uh matured or hatched out and so that is something that as we raise
bees we select for that behavior and that's improved that situation tremendously and continues
to to work through that so the final thing I would say uh when we talk about things like
colony collapse disorder and the reason there has been no uh no specific disease identified
is that most of us have come to the conclusion that this is a reflection of multiple stressors
in the environment coming together at the same time and although bees are really pretty
resilient and through history have overcome and adapted when you throw dozens of things
at them all at once they can't sort of adapt to one thing and move on to the next it's
all coming at 'em at at the same time it lowers their immune systems and their ability to
sort of stay healthy and so you see the hive sort of dwindle and die off and uh and get
all these other problems so you know it's it's a complicated problem I I think part
of the difficulty with with that question is that uh we live in a society where simple
answers are what we all want and uh the media has not really given good enough explanations
of all the all the intricacies and the variables that come into play with this so you can't
sort of lay it off on for example just pesticides pesticides of course are a problem for any
insect and in the wrong places uh you see that as destroying bees quite a bit I think
that's probably more the issue they have in California around here I don't see it as a
big issue uh in the last twelve years I don't think we've had a pesticide incident and we're
in a lot of different parts of the of the valley here and on a lot of different kinds
of farms but for the most part farmers are much more aware than they used to be and they're
smart and they understand the importance of warning me if they're gonna spray something
that might harm the bees and so the relationship we we've developed is part of the our minimizing
risk of these things so there's a lot of things bees are susceptible to uh but one of the
things we also sort of have uh an optimism about is that we know that the social honeybee
has been on the planet for about two hundred million years so this is an old an old game
that these bees have played over the years and they've survived all kinds of natural
disasters and things in the past and kept coming back so they're actually a very resourceful
species given their opportunity This excerpt is brought to you by the Massachusetts School
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