beecolonycollapse
Pipeline builders plan habitats for pollinators.
Builders of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline have announced that new butterfly and bee pollinator habitats will be established along the pipeline route while opponents of the natural gas transmission line are hosting a summit Saturday in Wilson.
By LINDELL JOHN KAY
Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Builders of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline have announced that new butterfly and bee pollinator habitats will be established along the pipeline route while opponents of the natural gas transmission line are hosting a summit Saturday in Wilson.
The 600-mile underground pipeline is planned by four major energy companies: Duke Progress Energy, Dominion Energy, Piedmont Natural Gas and Southern Company Gas. Supporters say the pipeline will help meet growing energy needs; opponents say the pipeline will endanger waterways along its route.
At the summit, a wide-ranging group of speakers will lead a discussion on topics that include the pipeline's economic impacts; high consequence areas along the proposed pipeline route; the effect on landowners and communities; environmental justice impacts on minority and low income communities; and how safe, renewable energy and efficiency could help make Eastern North Carolina independent of fossil fuels and prevent rapid climate change, said Hope Taylor of Clean Water for North Carolina.
Keynote speakers scheduled to appear are Cathy Kunkel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and Jacqui Patterson of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program.
The meeting is set for 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the Del Mastro Auditorium at Wilson Community College. Advance registration is required by Thursday. Light refreshments will be provided.
The pollinator habitats are meant to help address a sharp decline in such habitats in Eastern North Carolina and Virginia, with 750 acres of suitable locations identified along 50 miles of pipeline route. The voluntary program was developed with collaboration of participating landowners, said Tammie McGee, manager of corporate media relations for Duke.
Pollinators are essential to the production of many of the fruits and vegetables people eat each day. However, pollinator populations — particularly bees and butterflies — have declined sharply in recent years due to the loss of suitable habitat. The initiative should create hundreds of acres of new pollinator habitat by replanting the pipeline's right of way with native grasses and wildflowers that attract the insects.
Dozens of native seed mixes have been developed for the program, including native grasses such as Little Bluestem and Beaked Panicum, and wildflowers such as Partridge Pea and Black-Eyed Susan, said Pamela Faggert, Dominion Energy’s chief environmental officer and senior vice president of sustainability.
“Utility corridors offer ideal habitats for all kinds of wildlife, but especially the pollinators that are so essential for food production,” Faggert said. “This initiative builds on the more than 43,000 acres of pollinator habitats Dominion Energy has created along our electric transmission and distribution rights of way. We’re excited to build on that progress and continue doing our part to improve our region’s natural environment.”
In developing the program, the project consulted with a number of wildlife experts, including Bob Glennon, a private lands biologist for Virginia Tech’s Conservation Management Institute.
“By replanting the pipeline right of way with pollinator habitats, as opposed to mowed grasses, we’ll be creating hundreds of acres of new habitat for these species that we otherwise wouldn’t have,” Glennon said. “I couldn’t think of a more environmentally beneficial use of these spaces, and I’m very proud to be a part of it.”
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Santa Barbara’s bee whisperer.
Nick Wigle saves hidden hives with love and kindness.
There is a man among us who talks to the bees. They spoke recently on a warm Sunday morning in my driveway. Nick Wigle was standing with his hands on his hips, squinting down at a small gas-meter vault packed with 3,000 stinging residents. “All right, guys,” he said. “We’re going to take this nice and easy.” The hive buzzed back, its low tone telegraphing the gentleness unique to Santa Barbara’s bees.
I’d liked the idea of hosting honeybees, but the young swarm, recently propagated from its mother hive somewhere in our Mission Canyon neighborhood, chose a particularly inconvenient time and place to move in, right near the front door and in the middle of some construction work. We wouldn’t hit them with pesticides — we worried about the modern plight of the bumblebee known as colony collapse disorder — so we looked up live removal services. Wigle, owner and operator of Super Bee Rescue and Removal, came highly recommended for his passion and professionalism. Turns out, he also puts on a bit of a show.
As he lit his smoke can and set up a CAUTION sign, Wigle told me he’d just wrapped up a few tough removals of unusually aggressive — “spicy” — colonies that necessitated a boom lift and a vacuum. He was looking forward to a mellower job where he could leave off his protective suit and simply “be with the bees.” Crouched down with head and hands exposed, he gingerly propped open the vault lid. A volleyball-size hive shimmering with wings clung to its underside.
Slowly but deliberately, Wigle began prying off thick slabs of honeycomb and transferring them to a wooden beekeeper’s box. He’d scoop up a handful of bees now and then and tip them into the round opening. I surprised myself by feeling both assured and amazed as I watched the tricky dance of trust taking place just a few feet away. Every so often, a rogue bee would dart angrily toward me. Wigle would walk over calmly and shepherd it back.
All the while, Wigle narrated the history of my hive’s budding life cycle, its workers’ flight path over a nearby honeysuckle bush, and how Alamar Avenue below us is affectionately known among beekeepers as “bee alley” for its abundance of healthy colonies. He half-joked about how he was careful not to look like a bear, by showering and shaving before a removal job. He was able to smell the bees’ moods — “acidic, unripe bananas” when they’re agitated and a “warm, happy” scent of pheromones when they tell one another it’s safe to move from their hive to the box. The changeover of the queen is the absolute foolproof form of persuasion.
Right then he spotted her. “There you are,” he said softly, plucking the matriarch from the brood and placing her on her new waxen throne. “Watch,” he said. “Soon they’ll start walking over on their own.” Within minutes, a line of female workers and male drones began marching dutifully from the vault to the box. An hour later the changeover was complete. There didn’t appear to be any casualties.
Wigle handed me a jar of honey from a previous job and said thanks for calling him. If the gas company had gotten to the hive before he did, they would have nuked it, he said. Then he loaded up his tools and the hive and headed to his home at HeartStone Ranch in Carpinteria. There, he will nurse the colony — inevitably weakened by the move — back to full health before selling it to a backyard beekeeper or commercial farmer.
Wigle said it’s not unusual for clients who’ve requested a removal to ask for their hive back. They wind up missing it. “Bees are incredibly intelligent and incredibly sweet,” he said. “People realize bees are not out to kill — they’re more like cows with wings.”
I already miss mine.
Nick Wigle isn’t the only live-bee-rescue expert in town. And he’s not cheap. There are hobbyists and part-timers who handle easy removals for free or a nominal fee. But few, if any, have the equipment, insurance, and experience that Wigle does.
Wigle relishes the jobs no one wants — 50-year-old monster hives wedged in the delicate rafters of a historic estate, migrating swarms that take up residence in crowded malls and schools. With only one full-time employee, he still manages one major removal a day, sawing through walls and army-crawling through attics to reach the bees. An infrared camera pinpoints hidden hives, which maintain an internal temperature of 92-93 degrees. Wigle rarely takes a day off, and he recently bought his own lift because he kept returning his rentals covered in honey. “They didn’t like that,” he smiled.
Frustrated pest-control companies — which often have trouble fully exterminating bees because they accidentally leave the hive or some honeycomb behind for the next swarm to find — tip him off to new work. Wigle pays them in money or honey. “I do not want there to be a single beehive that has to get exterminated,” he declared, explaining how critical the pollinators are to the county’s avocados, strawberries, and dozens of other fruit and vegetable crops.
More than eight feet of honeycomb guarded by 20,000 bees were extracted from inside this home’s chimney flume.
With a South Coast coverage zone, Wigle is regularly contracted by the City of Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Unified School District, and last year he removed and relocated colonies from a UCSB Associated Students building and a dead 35-foot palm tree at the zoo.
In beekeeping terms, Wigle is a relative newcomer, starting just eight years ago. But he’s packed in a lot in those years, and he credits an entrepreneurial streak from his childhood for guiding him into it. At age 9, he started his own egg business on his parents’ avocado ranch. They assumed he’d tend to a few chickens and then lose interest. Instead he built an empire of 150 chickens and hauled crates of eggs to the farmers’ market, where he’d sit and sell in his overalls. He partnered with his sister, but bought her out in a hostile takeover.
In high school, Wigle got into electronics and helped his dad fix his office computers before starting his own mobile repair business. Many of his clients, he found, needed help selling vintage cars and antique furniture on eBay, so he turned that into his next moneymaking venture. That lasted until 2008, when the economy tanked. Wigle took a job with the Sheriff’s Office and worked as a custody deputy for two years, stationed at the jail. But the place wore on him. “I need to be outside, and I need to be helping people,” he said. “I couldn’t do either at the jail.”
Around this time, Wigle’s parents divorced. His mother kept the ranch, but she worried about how to make it financially viable since root rot had killed all the avocado trees. On Craigslist, Wigle found a commercial beekeeper looking for a home for his 600 hives. They offered space on the ranch, and in addition to paying rent, the beekeeper — a Russian man named Anatole who spoke little English — agreed to apprentice Wigle. “He did the best he could,” said Wigle, “but I had to go read every beekeeping book I could find because I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about.”
By the end of his training, Wigle had absorbed a quirky but invaluable mix of old-world, sensory-based beekeeping techniques along with Western scientific knowledge. “That allows me to work with pretty much any kind of client,” he said. “For instance, if a client is like, ‘We want to do this super organically and, you know, be hippies,’ I think, great, I love that game.” He recalled the rescue at my house. “That day I decided I was just going to sit and commune with the bees.”
It was another Sunday morning, and this time we were at his ranch. The main house, as it often is, was rented out for a wedding, so Wigle; his wife, Rachel; and their young daughter, Sarah, stay in a guesthouse off the barn. Sarah likes to play with stinger-less male bees she calls the “fuzzies.”
Wigle was walking two helpers — his employee, Tracy, and the family nanny, Chelsea — through the process of spinning out honey from wax, which they’d later use to make candles. The thick, amber liquid oozed into four gallon-size buckets and filled the kitchen with a sticky-sweet aroma. The giggles came easily. Wigle called it “honey delirium.”
Super Bee is big on education, said Wigle. He spends large portions of his nonstop workweek tending to the hives of 80 or so residential beekeeper clients, teaching them how to recognize the signs of whether a colony is struggling or thriving. It takes patience. “I know instant gratification is awesome,” Wigle tells people, “but welcome to farming.” Among his clients are Montecito celebrities whom he won’t name. “I don’t care how many movies or records you’ve made,” he said. “If you’re interested in bees, we can be friends.”
Commercial farms and ranches also contract Wigle, some holding as many as 36 separate hives. In his own “hospital apiary,” he has more than 100, with plans to turn an old Airstream trailer on the property into a honey processing room. He also wants to re-establish a plexiglass-sided observation hive at the Museum of Natural History, where he sometimes lectures. Schools invite him to talk to kids, who, he said, “always ask the best questions. Though it gets tricky explaining the mating cycle.” When a male drone mates with a queen, his reproductive organs are ripped out mid-air. “We tell the kids it’s the boy bee’s last day because it just takes so much out of him.”
Wigle has trained dozens of interns and WWOOFers (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an international program of work-stay volunteers). The experience helped him overcome his introverted personality, which made him the quiet kid in high school and created some difficulty with early clients. Now, he really enjoys chitchatting — especially about bees.
One of his favorite topics is how particularly large, healthy hives are turning up these days — a welcome relief from the early years of colony collapse disorder (CCD) in 2008 and 2009, when bee populations around the world were perishing mysteriously at astonishingly high rates. No single cause could be identified, though potential culprits include mites, parasites, pesticides, and habitat loss. Panic spread that the species might not survive, threatening the security of the world’s food web. While certainly still a serious problem, CCD losses appear to be slowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Still sticky from her honeycomb crib, a baby bee emerges into the world.
With its temperate climate and hearty lineages of drought-tolerant bees, Santa Barbara avoided widespread catastrophe, though did suffer a general decline and a couple of scary incidents. In 2012, 18 hives within a two-mile radius in Montecito suddenly failed, many of them under the care of Wigle and his clients. “It was horrible,” he remembered. Keepers connect deeply with their bees. There was grief and anger. “It was like a family member died.” Worse, there were no answers, though Wigle suspects pesticides.
Too often, Wigle said, one hive is sprayed and the poisons are spread among many others. “A lot of landscapers in town spray without a license and without the knowledge of what they’re really doing,” he said. Two years ago in Carpinteria, piles of dead bees suddenly appeared throughout the office park that was Lynda.com’s headquarters. Concerned beekeepers collected some of the bodies for testing, but guards on the property confiscated them, news reports at the time stated. No explanation could be pinpointed, but again, pesticides were at the top of the suspect list.
Wigle may look like a wild man with a death wish when he reaches bare-handed into a ball of stinging insects, but those moments are careful and calculated, because Wigle insists on a safety-first approach to all his work. Much earlier in his career, he learned the hard way when he was stung in the head more than 50 times by a hive of Africanized bees in Winchester Canyon. He’s still nailed occasionally, but he’s built up such a tolerance that he barely feels it. He knows other beekeepers who swear by the health benefits of the toxin, which in small doses has reportedly helped reduce pain and inflammation from arthritis or autoimmune diseases.
Africanized bees — the more belligerent cousin species of the Western honeybee — are rarely found in Santa Barbara, said Wigle. Other areas of the country don’t have it as easy Some beekeepers in the Southwestern states, for instance, have no choice but to suit up in heavy gear, meticulously searching for any small opening. Even then, they tiptoe toward their hives, wait 50 yards away, and sometimes turn around slowly if the colony looks like it’s having a particularly bad day.
On the other end of the spectrum are Santa Barbara bees, with their relatively laid-back colonies. According to Wigle, the calmest are in downtown Santa Barbara and the spicier are around Goleta. Year-round access to nectar and pollen keep hives fat and happy. That’s why commercial beekeepers from as far away as the East Coast truck their hives here for the winter, when eucalyptus and gum trees are in bloom. You’ll often see them parked in open fields near Costco.
There’s a mid-17th-century beekeeper saying still used today that goes “A swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly,” meaning that later in the year there’s less time for new bee colonies to collect pollen from blossoms so they can survive the winter. So Wigle advises would-be keepers to hold tight until the spring.
In the meantime, he’ll keep spreading the word. “Call it what you want,” he said. “Stupid, brave, something else. I just want people to know you don’t have to kill bees. There’s another way.”
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No offense, American bees, but your sperm isn't cutting it.
This story is for mature bees only.
Seducing a honeybee drone — one of the males in a colony whose only job is to mate with the queen — is not too difficult. They don’t have stingers, so you just pick one up. Apply a little pressure to the abdomen and the drone gets randy, blood rushing to his endophallus, bringing him to climax.
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“They’re really accommodating,” says Susan Cobey, a honeybee breeder on Whidbey Island, Wash. “One ejaculate is about 1 microliter, and it takes 10 microliters to artificially inseminate a queen.”
Since 2008, Cobey has done her share of bee abdomen rubbing as part of a research team from Washington State University traveling through Europe and Asia. They’ve collected sperm from native honeybees in Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Kazakhstan and the Republic of Georgia — countries where honeybees have favorable genetic traits, like resistance to the varroa mite. The deadly parasite has been cited as a major factor in bee deaths, along with genetics, poor nutrition and pesticide exposure, according to a major report from the USDA and EPA in 2013.
A honeybee pollinates one of the fruit trees in WSU’s orchard in Pullman, Wash. Shelly Hanks/Courtesy of Washington State University
Varroa mites are an invasive parasite from Asia that sucks hemolymph (bee blood) from adult and larval honeybees, weakening their immune systems and transmitting deadly pathogens, like bent wing virus. If left untreated, a varroa infestation can kill a colony in one year. First detected on U.S. soil in 1987, varroa has spread quickly, infesting upwards of 50 percent of American hives. Last year, 33 percent of U.S. honeybee hives died. That’s troubling for the plight of honeybees and U.S. agriculture, which relies on pollinators to produce one-third of the food we eat.
The buzz on American bees: too much inbreeding
According to the WSU research team, the root cause of the U.S. honeybees’ vulnerability to varroa is a dwindling gene pool that has left them short on genetic traits that help honeybees resist varroa elsewhere in the world.
“Honeybees aren’t native to America,” Cobey says. “We brought them here. But the U.S. closed its borders to live honeybee imports in 1922, and our honeybee population has been interbreeding ever since.”
WSU has monitored the genetic diversity of honeybee queens in Washington and California since 1994, showing a steady decline. Dr. Brandon Hopkins, the team’s expert in freezing and thawing bee sperm, likens honeybee breeding to a poker game played with an incomplete deck of cards. “There’s no way to get a four-of-a-kind if there aren’t four aces in the deck,” Hopkins says.
As a doctoral student at Washington State University, Dr. Brandon Hopkins perfected a system of freezing and thawing bee semen for use in artificial insemination. Shelly Hanks/Courtesy of Washington State University
The imported semen has restacked the deck. WSU’s crossbred honeybees already test positive at a higher level of genetic diversity than the first queens tested in 1994. “This doesn’t mean they are superior in performance to the other bees,” Hopkins says. “It means we have a better chance of finding rare and unique traits.”
It used to be that honeybee breeders selected for bees that produced more honey, grew more populous hives, and were gentler to handle. Now, they want honeybees that can resist varroa. Without it, beekeepers must rely on costly “miticide” treatments to control varroa.
However, studies suggest the mites are developing resistance to pesticides and the chemicals may be harming honeybees, compounding the problem of widespread bee deaths known as Colony Collapse Disorder.
“I lost 40 percent of my colonies to varroa last fall,” says Matthew Shakespear, whose company, Olson’s Honeybees, raises 16,000 hives in central Washington. “I’m not taking any more chances. We’ve already done five treatments, compared with the two treatments we applied this time last year.”
Wild apple tree forest blooms in the Tian Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan, where the WSU team gathered bee semen from the species apis mellifera pomonella, hoping it will have traits helpful for pollinating domestic apples. Photo by Ryan Bell.
A problem that blooms in almond orchards
Pollination services like Olson’s Honeybees are the cornerstone of a $15 billion segment of U.S. agriculture. A hefty share of that is the almond industry, whose trees are completely reliant on honeybees for pollination. It’s also the industry most susceptible to fallout from the varroa epidemic in bees: California’s almond groves serve as an incubator for the growth and spread of varroa mites across the United States.
“There are 800,000 acres of almonds in California,” says Patrick Heitkam, owner of Heitkam’s Honey Bees in Orland, Calif. “It takes two hives to pollinate one acre, so that’s a need for 1.6 million hives. There are only 500,000 hives in the state, so the rest are trucked in from around the country.”
Almond trees bloom in January, a time of the year when most honeybee varieties are dormant in their hives. But an Italian species of honeybee, Apis mellifera linguistica, which evolved in the warm Mediterranean climate, is active when the first almond blossom pops in late-January, making them the most popular variety in the U.S.
The trouble is, Italian honeybees are extremely susceptible to varroa mites, because their hives grow so big, so fast and so early.
“Italian honeybees rear their babies and varroa mites nearly one-for-one,” says Dr. Robert Danka, a research entomologist at the USDA’s Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Research Unit in Baton Rouge, La.
Lessons from mighty Russian stingers
Like the WSU team, Danka has also looked to the Old World for an answer to varroa mites. Between 1994 and 2000, he traveled to the Russian far east, where a local honeybee, Apis mellifera, has developed resistance to varroa. They are descended from European honeybees brought by Russian settlers traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway at the turn of the 20th century. The journey inadvertently transplanted the honeybees into the native range of varroa mites in east Asia, where they evolved resistance to the pest.
These Russian bees groom themselves, biting and crushing the mites. They also have a prevalent genetic trait called varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH), aborting larval honeybees infested with mites and removing them from the hive before the parasite can spread.
Dr. Brandon Hopkins removes a container of cryogenically frozen bee semen. Photo by Ryan Bell.
Danka brought back 360 queens, the basis for what is now a robust Russian honeybee population in the United States. While their prowess as mite biters continues, Russian honeybees haven’t proven up to task as commercial pollinators. The queens are used to long Russian winters, so they are slow at building up their hives, meaning only a small number are ready to fly in the almond groves come January.
Survival of the fittest bees
Still, Danka says the Russian honeybee offers proof that a European subspecies can develop varroa mite resistance through natural selection. That evolutionary process is interrupted in commercial beehives, because of the “prophylactic use of miticides,” Danka says. “We’re maintaining varroa-susceptible bees through chemistry. If we took away all those pesticide treatments – and to be clear, I’m not advocating for this – the results would be horrific. But in a rather short period of time, only varroa-resistant bees would be left.” And those bees could be the basis of a new population.
Previously, researchers had to work with fresh semen, which lasted only a few weeks. With Hopkins’ methodology, the researchers have produced a large “bank” of cryogenically semen like this for use all year. Photo by Ryan Bell.
Matthew Shakespear, the commercial honeybee keeper in Yakima, Wash., would rather not spend money treating his hives for varroa mites. Starting last year, he diversified his business to include hives of Carniolan honeybees, Apis mellifera carnica, a subspecies native to Eastern Europe.
The queens he bought were the great-great-great granddaughters of a honeybee drone that Susan Cobey found in the mountains of Slovenia.
“Maybe these new genetics can deal with the varroa mites naturally, rather than having to rely on chemicals,” Shakespeare says. “It’s time to start widening our gene pool.”
Top photo of a honeybee pollinating a fruit tree in WSU’s orchard by Shelly Hanks/Courtesy of Washington State University. This story was produced in partnership with NPR’s The Salt. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.
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Wildlife faces climate's survival and sex problems.
Climate change is likely to bring bad times for many bee species, and tricky sex problems for marine turtles too.
Climate change is likely to bring bad times for many bee species, and tricky sex problems for marine turtles too.
LONDON, 9 July, 2017 – Climate change could cast a dark shadow over the bees of Europe, with global warming posing sex problems for the sea turtles of the Atlantic.
Two separate studies confirm the worries that rising carbon dioxide levels, and soaring planetary temperatures, could devastate the creatures of the wild.
There are an estimated 550 species of bee in Germany, many of them solitary and short-lived: females devote their few weeks in the sun to feeding, reproducing and leaving food for their offspring.
What becomes of vital importance is the moment of hatching: if a bee emerges from hibernation too early, there is no food available, and starvation can follow. And spring has advanced steadily through the decades.
Controlled environment
Researchers at the University of Würzburg report in the Journal of Animal Ecology that they set up 36 large flight cages to experiment with three species of mason bee that emerge in the spring, and controlled the cage environment so that the bees emerged as the plants in the cage flowered, or three, or six days previously.
Then they monitored the bees over the brief bee lifespan. Some of the bees that emerged too early did not survive. Those that did survive were less active and produced fewer of the next generation.
“Already, a minor temporal mismatch of three or six days is enough to harm bees,” said Mariela Schenk, who led the study.
One species responded to the food shortage by producing fewer females and more males – drones need less food than females. Another species responded by placing fewer brood cells in each nest. A third species became more active in the second half of its life, but not active enough to offset the bad start.
Overall, bad timing seemed to be bad for the bees. The plants that depend on bee pollination can hardly profit either.
Creatures of habit
Research like this now confirms that climate change is going to impose a toll on biodiversity: like humans, wild things like the weather patterns to be more or less predictable.
There is clear and repeated evidence that alpine insects, plants and even birds need to move to higher ground as temperatures rise. Butterflies, too, face the same challenge and ecologists and biologists have begun to record local extinctions: even if the species survives, its range becomes more limited.
The loggerhead sea turtle could be at risk for a different reason: it is one of those species in which the sex of the hatchling is determined by the temperature at which it incubates.
Scientists from Swansea University in the UK report in the journal Global Change Biology that they monitored sand temperatures at a loggerhead turtle nesting site at Cape Verde in the tropical Atlantic for six years.
They also recorded the survival rates of 3,000 nests to find a link between incubation temperature and hatchling survival, and then they simulated the challenge for the species as planetary temperatures climb over the rest of the century.
“We should really keep a close eye on incubation temperatures and the in-nest survival rates of sea turtles if we want to successfully protect them”
For the moment, the turtles are safe. Warmer incubation will for a while increase the natural growth rate of a population. Warmer temperatures mean more females and more hatchlings.
“However, beyond a critical temperature, the natural growth rate of the population decreases because of an increase of temperature-linked in-nest mortality. Temperatures are too high and the developing embryos do not survive. This threatens the long-term survival of this sea turtle population,” said Jacques-Olivier Laloë, who led the research.
“In recent years, in places like Florida – another important sea turtle nesting site – more and more turtle nests are reported to have lower survival rates than in the past.
“This shows that we should really keep a close eye on incubation temperatures and the in-nest survival rates of sea turtles if we want to successfully protect them.” – Climate News Network
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Report: Global warming threatens North Carolina's bees.
Global warming and urbanization are threatening bee populations across the country. One factor in that threat is heat. At high temperatures, bees become unable to reproduce, fly or even walk.
Global warming and urbanization are threatening bee populations across the country. One factor in that threat is heat. At high temperatures, bees become unable to reproduce, fly or even walk.
So researchers from North Carolina State University recently set out to see just how much heat local wild bees could handle.
Steve Frank, associate professor of entomology at NC State University, tested 15 species of the most common wild bee species that exist in Southern cities to identify the highest temperatures each could withstand. Frank said the study focused on urban areas because the infrastructure in cities causes them to be a few degrees hotter than surrounding rural areas.
Researchers first tested how much heat wild species could tolerate inside a test tube.
“At their maximum temperatures, bees become incapacitated. They’re near death,” Frank said.
After lab testing, researchers compared the bees' tolerance to how often they could be found in urban backyards. The scientists counted bee species in 18 backyards in Wake County during spring and summer months for two years.
As predicted, bee species that are less tolerant to heat were less prevalent in hotter, urban locations. These so-called heat islands are simply urban areas surrounded by asphalt roads, concrete and less grass and tree shade.
BEES NECESSARY FOR NORTH CAROLINA AGRICULTURE
Frank said some bees were more vulnerable to heat, with a heat tolerance about 10 degrees lower than other species. Those bees may be likely to move out of a region as it becomes closer to their maximum heat tolerance. As temperatures rise, that could be bad for Southern farmers.
"Some crops can only be pollinated by bumblebees, for instance, because they rely on the specific way a bumblebee buzzes, or vibrates when it reaches a flower, is what shakes out the pollen, and other bees just can't do that, " Frank said.
Frank said the results should be especially concerning in North Carolina.
"North Carolina is one of the most rapidly urbanizing states in the country," he said. "It also relies heavily on agriculture for its economy. And so if we lose pollinators, that could negatively affect our economy."
Bumblebees were among the least heat tolerant species in North Carolina. The bees become incapacitated at about 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Bumblebees were also the first bee to be named an endangered species in the United States.
BEES THAT CAN'T STAND THE HEAT LEAVE
Frank said the study’s results mean bumblebees and other vulnerable species could disappear from the South as temperatures rise from global warning.
"The geographic area of some bumblebees is contracting as the climate warms, which means those species are moving North. As the climate warms, we can lose species, not just because they die, but because they leave," he said.
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Beekeepers sweeten solar sites with the 'Tesla of honey.'
By pairing pollinators with solar farms, Travis and Chiara Bolton are reimagining commercial beekeeping.
Beekeepers Sweeten Solar Sites With the 'Tesla of Honey'
By pairing pollinators with solar farms, Travis and Chiara Bolton are reimagining commercial beekeeping.
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Honeybees likes these at the University of California, Davis, are essential to food crops, but imperiled. A new standard for solar farms aims to expand both clean energy and pollinator habitat.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANAND VARMA, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
Transformational ideas can come from anywhere. From anyone. National Geographic’s Chasing Genius is now soliciting ideas around three issues: sustainable planet, global health, and feeding nine billion. Could your solution be a spark of genius? Check out the challenge, where the best ideas for improving our world each can win $25,000.
The SolarWise garden in Ramsey, Minnesota, doesn't look especially cutting edge as solar farms go. But in April, it quietly achieved a milestone: It became the first U.S. solar facility to host commercial beekeeping. The apiary is part of an effort to rethink how land for clean energy can be used to supply more than just kilowatts.
Instead of the gravel or turf grass that typically underlies a solar array, the one in Ramsey has low-growing, pollinator-friendly plants and 15 hives installed by Bolton Bees, a local honey producer about 35 miles away in St. Paul. Two other solar apiaries followed in the state, with more on the way.
The rise of solar energy in the United States coincides with a growing awareness that pollinators, which help grow three-quarters of the world's food crops, are in trouble. American produce ranging from almonds to blueberries depends heavily on this winged workforce. But in the U.S., beekeepers lost more than 40 percent of their colonies in 2016 due to a variety of factors.
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Travis and Chiara Bolton founded their Minnesota company after beekeeping as a hobby for several years.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY FRESH ENERGY
The couple behind Bolton Bees, Travis and Chiara Bolton, are building their small business on an expansive vision, one where the use of land for solar is sweetened by the presence of local bees. (See nine ways you can help bees at home.)
Chiara Bolton first learned about beekeeping on an economic development project in rural Tibet. But when she tried it back home, she learned how hard it was to keep bees alive during the harsh Minnesota winters.
"I kind of got hooked," she says. Together, season after season, she and Travis bred Minnesota-hardy bees and found a market among backyard beekeepers who needed queens that could withstand the winters.
At the time, she was a nursing home manager and he had a home remodeling business. But two years ago, they quit their existing jobs to focus full-time on beekeeping, selling both bees and location-specific honey.
"One of the things that’s so special about beekeeping is you get to be in nature all day, every day," Travis Bolton says. "Our office is in a beautiful meadow surrounded by woods."
When they saw a solar array go up nearby, they mused that it might make a good location for hives. But they didn't pursue the idea until a local clean energy advocate, Fresh Energy, invited them to install hives at the Ramsey site.
"It’s been pretty amazing how fast it’s caught on," he says. "My phone rings almost constantly." The Boltons are in talks to install apiaries at more solar projects in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois.
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Rob Davis, director of Fresh Energy's media and innovation program, says that as pro-solar policies progressed in Minnesota, he began hearing more about land use concerns: Was it a good idea to take productive farmland and cover it with solar panels?
"We realized that rural Minnesota, and rural areas of the country, needed to be able to see that they would benefit from this transition to clean energy," he says.
While the practice of coupling solar arrays with meadows is common in Europe, it's relatively new in the United States, where solar was pioneered via desert megaprojects in California and Nevada. Newer projects in the Midwest and elsewhere need to take farm communities into account.
A recently established solar standard in Minnesota encourages developers to plant wildflowers and native plants along with panels as a way to make them more appealing to pollinators and to farmers with land to lease or crops nearby. For developers, Davis says, the upfront cost of the seeds and planting is offset in the long term by lower maintenance costs—no turf to mow or gravel erosion to manage.
Davis says he approached Bolton Bees because he was struck by their modern packaging and variety of local honeys.
"It feels like the Tesla of honey," he says. "It's honey that makes you think about the supply chain. It's honey that actually educates you."
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Bolton Bees' jars tell the story of the place where each location-specific honey was harvested.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY CONNEXUS ENERGY
SOLAR HONEY STARTUP
After installing their first solar hives in April, the Boltons took the concept and ran with it. They plan to extract 4,000 pounds of solar honey this year; some will be sold in grocery stores, while some will go to solar customers. They have also trademarked a Solar Honey standard and label that they hope other beekeepers will adopt, promoting the idea of smarter land use and local beekeeping.
"We definitely have big ambitions for this," Travis Bolton says. "We think this is a model that can be replicated by local beekeepers throughout the country."
Many commercial beekeepers move their hives around the country, following seasons and crops. The Boltons are advocating more local habitat, such as the new solar meadows, and more local bee stock. Because their colonies are bred to be in one place, they say, the hives tend to be more stable.
The couple also wants to inspire a new generation of local beekeepers, noting that many in the profession are aging out of it.
"There are many beekeeping businesses like ours throughout the country," Travis Bolton says. "But there could be more."
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How to protect our disappearing bumble bees.
Homeowners, community members, school gardeners, farmers—everyone can help.
Homeowners, community members, school gardeners, farmers—everyone can help
By Susan Carpenter on March 24, 2017
Bombus affinis, a.k.a. the rusty-patched bumble bee, has just been declared endangered Credit: USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr
On March 21, the rusty-patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis, officially became the first bumble bee listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. This designation recognizes this important pollinator’s precarious position in the face of multiple threats to its survival. It also provides some of the tools necessary to begin to reverse its decline.
We must take action now to prevent the extinction of the rusty-patched and other imperiled bumble bees and foster native pollinators to maintain agricultural productivity and healthy ecosystems. While federal regulations will provide some protection for this species, there are steps you can take in your own community to support the survival of these bees.
Bumble bees like the rusty-patched bumble bee are crucial for gardens, orchards, prairies, woodlands, and wetlands. They transfer pollen from flower to flower in many plant species, resulting in the production of fruits and seeds. In turn, we and other animals rely on plants, fruits and seeds for our survival and health. Bumble bees are especially efficient at pollinating vegetables like tomatoes and peppers, as well as many commercially important fruits.
Over the last two decades, the rusty-patched bumble bee has disappeared from most of its original range, and its remaining populations are small. The major threats to this and other pollinators include habitat loss, disease and pathogens, pesticides, and a changing climate. Unlike honeybees, bumble bees do not store honey, making them more susceptible to gaps in availability of flowers and extreme weather events.
The rusty-patched bumble bee only exists in small populations in a few areas of the upper Midwest. It is still found in southern Wisconsin, including at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum, where our restored prairies, savannas, and woodlands provide the diverse native plant habitat they need to survive. The Arboretum invites visitors to observe and learn about bumble bees, and we train students and volunteers to help monitor them. The landscapes maintained by the Arboretum help us learn how to restore and enhance pollinator habitat.
Homeowners, community members, school gardeners, farmers—everyone—can help protect the rusty-patched bumble bee and other native pollinators. Even if you live outside of its range, these actions will help support your local bees and other pollinators.
Most importantly, plant a wide variety of native plants that provide continuous blooms throughout the season. Consult the Xerces Society, Pollinator Partnership, or local experts to learn which native species will support pollinators. Plant masses of flowers close together in gardens and yards to help attract bees. Encourage neighbors to plant pollinator-friendly wildflowers or gardens to create a larger network of pollinator habitat. Avoid using pesticides, especially systemic insecticides that persist throughout the plant or in soils. Check that plants and seeds purchased from nurseries are not pre-treated with systemic insecticides.
Farmers and rural landowners can include pollinator habitat to encourage crop pollination and maintain healthy ecosystems. Improve pollinator habitat in hedgerows, uncultivated edges, roadsides, and on recreational or conservation land.
You can also provide places for bumble bees to nest, while making sure not to disturb nests that you find. Bumble bee colonies are often underground, or in compost, rock walls, hollow logs and under bunch grasses. Nests are occupied for only a year. Unlike ground-nesting yellow jacket wasps, bumble bees have small colonies and are rarely aggressive.
Make a habit of photographing and monitoring bumble bees and other pollinators. You can submit your photos to Bumble Bee Watch to help track both rare and common bumble bees. Get involved in local gardening and conservation groups to carry out pollinator protection plans.
These practices will support the rusty-patched and other bumble bees where they live, support other species, provide agricultural benefits, and give us a more complete picture of our essential pollinators. As spring arrives and the bumble bee flight season begins, you can help maintain these bees as crucial links in our food supply and healthy landscapes.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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