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Photos Michael Iacuessa
Sally Nerber checks her colony. |
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Cape hives still thrive
By Michael Iacuessa
Banner Correspondent
Last fall honeybees began dying mysteriously in large numbers across much of the country, putting a scare into an agricultural industry reliant on them for pollination of crops. As anyone who has gone outside recently for a picnic is well aware, the species is still doing quite fine here. While honeybees in New York and New Jersey have been affected, thus far those in Massachusetts have been spared.
"They're busy and they seem to be in good shape," reports Sally Nerber, a Wellfleet resident who has kept bees for 50 years.
Nerber is one of at least a half-dozen beekeepers in Wellfleet and, according to the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, among 150 on Cape Cod. On the Cape, honeybees are kept less for pollination purposes and more for the sweet nectar they produce, a single hive able to manufacture between 30 to 100 pounds of honey. That the still unknown deadly ailment has not been noticed here, combined with the warm, dry summer, make for what appears will be a good year for honey for local beekeepers.
Harvesting season ranges from June to September. According to Dr. John Portnoy, an ecologist at the National Seashore and keeper of 10 hives at his Wellfleet home, the nectars collected earlier in the summer are lighter in color and have a more delicate flavor. The honey generally comes from bees pollinating three plants: black locust, winterberry shrub and sweet pepper bush, which blooms in August.
"In my experience, those three are the most important sources of nectar here," he says.
Honey harvested in the fall, after bees have pollinated goldenrod, are darker and stronger, but Portnoy points out that goldenrod is not as prominent on the Cape as it used to be.
Still, a lot of beekeepers wait until fall anyway. "The honey gets thicker as it stays in the hive," says Nerber. "The hives are busy weaving their wings and evaporating the water that comes in the nectar. Nectar is pretty runny when they put it in the cells."
Nerber, now 91, began keeping bees after discovering them squatting on the second floor of a Connecticut farmhouse she bought in the 1930s. She moved them outside to a pear tree and has kept bees wherever she has moved to since.
"They are kind of interesting and complicated creatures," she says. While most people would have an understandable fear of dealing with a bee hive, Nerber does not even bother to wear gloves. To clear them away to collect honey, she used a brush with soft bristles, as opposed to big companies which use chemicals to drive them deeper into the hive.
"They are pretty tolerant with going into the hive, going and taking it apart. They don't get angry if you are gentle with them. They're quiet if you don't drop them or you have to squeeze them." On the other hand she remains sensitive of the dangers. "I don't mess with them on a bad day. They are cross if it's cloudy and there is a little bit of rain and that kind of stuff."
Honeybees are all part of the same species but come in many races, according to Portnoy. The familiar black and yellow Italian bees are the most commonly kept in the U.S., especially for beginners, as they are relatively calm to work with and are excellent comb builders, but the darker Russian bees are becoming more popular due to their ability to withstand the Northeast winter. The African bees are among the best honey producers, but their defensive nature — and their reputation as being the killer bee — has made them less popular and led to hybrid breedings of the race.
Such cross-breedings are common. Helen Miranda Wilson, another Wellfleet resident, keeps five colonies, three of which are Italian but she suspects have some Russian ancestry. She also has two colonies in which the queens were mated locally.
Like Nerber, she grew up around honeybees but, in her case, did not begin keeping them until moving back to Wellfleet full-time in June 1999.
"I was used to being around honeybees because we had a feral colony that lived up inside the eaves of the house for decades," she said. "I love it. I wanted to do it my whole adult life. I'm a gardener and I always had an interest in insects."
For those raising honeybees, the prospect of them dying off like they are in other parts of the country would be disheartening, but the long-term effects are far more worrying.
"Many crops depend on one kind of insect or another for pollination, and honeybees are very much a part of that," said Nerber. "If you were to depend on pollination without bees and bugs I think we would be in a real problem economically because most of our food comes from the soil."
Colony collapse disorder (CCD), as it has been termed, has killed up to 70 percent of some commercial beekeepers’ colonies. Apple and almond growers in particular rely on those beekeepers but so do many other crops, including cranberries. In all, honeybees are estimated to be used to pollinate $14 billion worth of seeds and food every year.
After several theories as to the cause of CCD, including far-fetched ones like cell phone transmissions confusing their navigation systems, there is still no answer. What is known is that when they have been dissected they have been found to have almost every virus known to strike honeybees. In other words, something is causing their immune system to fail.
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Sep 6th, 2007