Cal Poly would be a different place without honeybees: no more blueberries, raspberries, avocadoes or almonds, horticulture and crop science lecturer and instructor of beekeeping Scott Jeffreys said.
This is a fate Cal Poly just recently avoided — narrowly.
“We had over 200 hives in 2005 to 2006,” Jeffreys said. “We then lost all but one hive.”
But with a new treatment that began just a month ago, Cal Poly is seeing a resurgence in its hives, Jeffreys said.
“We’ve been using a new product derived from hops called HopGuard,” he said. “Since we have started using HopGuard, the bees have been flying better, and the results were noticeable from day one.”
Scientists noticed a dramatic decline in the number of honeybees and a gradual decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers in the early 1970s, Scientific Magazine reported in 2006.
In late 2006 and 2007, the number of bees plummeted. The most comprehensive national census of insects, taken in January 2011, showed that the abundance of four common species of bumblebees in the U.S. dropped by 96 percent in the past few decades.
Cal Poly is a success story that brought back its hives and bee population from the single hive it had left, Jeffreys said.
“One hive was there for the class to use as a breeder hive to re-queen anything we could find alive to use as a learning tool,” Jeffreys said. “The results were that the beehives survived, but the bees stung the students without mercy.”
Cal Poly now has 120 beehives.
The dramatic die-off of bees is known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Bacterial infections caused by poor bee immune systems, harsh chemicals and even moving the bees around to pollinate other fields have been reasons for the occurrence of Colony Collapse Disorder, Jeffreys said.
The greatest threat to beehives though, is the varroa mite, a disease-carrying parasite.
“The varroa destructor vectors over 20 different viruses to honey bees,” he said. “This one creature has put the entire commercial beekeeping industry on their knees worldwide.”
Randy Oliver, who runs ScientificBeekeeping.com, said the varroa mite is the toughest challenge ever faced by beekeepers.
“Colony level and production these days is largely a function of varroa levels in the hives,” Oliver said. “The more mites, the more problems.”
Steps have been taken to eliminate mites from beehives. In 2001, genetically modified queen bees were introduced. They are specially bred with a behavioral trait called varroa sensitive hygiene. The trait allows them to detect and remove bee pupae that are infested by the varroa mite. However, the modified bees alone cannot contain the spreading of the mites and its disease, Oliver said.
In 2010, a company called BetaTec came up with a solution. It introduced HopGuard, a pesticide made from natural ingredients and an acid naturally produced by hops, a plant used to make beer.
The product is inserted into beehives via cardboard strips on which the bees crawl, rubbing the HopGuard onto their bodies in the process. When a mite tries to attach itself to a bee with HopGuard on it, the liquid weakens the mite’s exoskeleton, killing it.
Since using the product, Cal Poly has seen considerable mite reduction in its hives and a better overall health of bees.
“We have noticed fewer virus stricken bees crawling around the bee yards dying an agonizing death with their wings deformed so that they can’t fly away to die,” Jeffreys said. “We notice more bees still able to actually fly and more bees that actually are able to fly back to their hive before they die after a normal life of 30 days or so.”
Mann Lake, a company in Hackensack, Minn., and the main vendor of HopGuard, said the product has grown increasingly popular and that records have shown a major turn around in the health of bee colonies.
Research has shown significant mite drop with normal colony behavior observed in all treated hives, during and after treatment with HopGuard, the company said.
It has yet to be seen whether HopGuard can be a permanent solution for the varroa mite and whether the bees are going to be able to survive the current epidemic or fade into extinction, Jeffrey said.
Jeffreys said one thing is for sure, though: society either needs to obtain a greater respect for bees or get ready to live without them.
“Why should we care about bees?” he said. “That is like asking why should we care about anything? Why should we care about birds or fish? If you don’t want to eat fruit, fine, kill bees, but we are the ones that are going to have to deal with the consequences.”