Rosemary Gowdy, president of Valley View Acres in Westfield, displays some of her beeswax artwork during a craft show in 2010. Gowdy’s farm features fresh honey and honey-related products. (File photo by Frederick Gore)
WESTFIELD – Much has been made of the ongoing crisis occurring in the population of honeybees worldwide but these days Billy Crawford, owner of New England Apiary, is as busy as, well, a bee.
Starting at age ten, the Westfield native has spent most of his life tending to honeybees, a member of the animal kingdom fighting to make a comeback.
“The majority of western Mass. beekeepers are small hobbyists,” said Crawford, referencing apiarists who have around 20 hives, with around 50,000 bees residing in one hive. “It’s harder to keep bees these days.”
As a veteran of the industry, Crawford’s tenure with the tiny winged creatures goes back before the use of systemic pesticides and, with the arrival of these chemicals, more and more people have joined the apiary ranks.
It is this added interest in the industry that has coincided with decreases in honeybee populations all over the country, a phenomenon Crawford can’t explain.
“It almost appears that way,” he said of a hypothetical correlation between increases of beekeepers and decreases in bees. “But beekeepers still have to buy new bees, and most people lose bees to starvation, moisture in the hive in the winter, and not replacing the queen in the hive.”
“Massachusetts is kind of lucky as there are no large scale commercial farms growing corn and soy beans, which have correlations with honey bee deaths, as these crops use pesticides,” he said.
Another suspect in the disappearance is the Varroa mite, which he says apiarists should treat their hives for several times a year.
“Varroa mites host on bee larvae and can weaken a colony with disease,” Crawford said.
The parasite has been known to cause the deaths of entire colonies worldwide, and Crawford says that keepers can keep their hives safe by treating them with synthetic miticides and formic acid pads.
In Longmeadow, Jerry Nolet has been keeping bees for 40 years, and after spending 30 years working for Monsanto in Maryland, Nolet loves nothing more than to work on his garden with his little helpers.
“I usually have no more than two hives,” he said. “Gardening and beekeeping go together.”
Nolet says that 30 percent of everything we eat is pollinated, and that, due to the widespread use of the pesticides in the United States, the disappearance of the honeybees is a bigger problem here than in Europe.
“Bees are being stressed because they’re moved so much for pollinating almond, apple and peach trees,” Nolet said of other possible contributing factors. “Another factor in colony collapse is absconding, which is when bees leave the hive 1,000 at a time and never come back.”
After a recent screening of the 2012 Swiss documentary “More Than Honey” in Amherst, Dan Conlon, owner of Warm Colors Apiary in South Deerfield, spoke after the film, which focuses on both the future and treatment of bees in Europe and in California’s almond industry, and of the current status of the bees in western Mass.
“I thought the film was beautiful. We’ve been aware of the almonds for years,” Conlon said. “It’s the biggest cash crop in California. There’s over two million hives being use to pollinate.”
Conlon spoke of the contrast the Markus Imhoof documentary gave of the industries in America to Europe.
“The German Black Bee was the first bee to be introduced to the US,” he said. “And western Massachusetts is still pretty intact as far as native species.”
Conlon added that the presence of the Verroa mite, the loss of “genetic diversity”, and loss of habitat are the top three biggest problems facing bee populations in both America and abroad.
The film shows how bees are transported en masse on tractor-trailer trucks throughout the Northwest to pollinate various crops, but Conlon says his bees are only lent out to six or seven fruit growers.
“We work with Russian Bees. One hundred percent Russian stock,” he said. “They’re resistant to a lot, like the African bees, but they’re easier to work with. They’re cold weather, hardy bees.”
Conlon also adds that eliminating corn syrup from his bees’ diet has made them healthier, as it has been found to prevent a detoxification gene from becoming activated in bees.
“If you raise them on honey, they produce good honey, and our producers haven’t been suffering high losses,” he said.
