The bees not only receive an insufficient diet but must compete strenuously for it. “Hundreds of colonies go into an almond orchard at a time,” Mattila says, “so food can get spread pretty thin.” With so many bees around, some will also get lost and go home to the wrong hive. After all, she notes, “bees are used to nesting in trees, not in one of a thousand boxes that all look the same.” The upshot is that a malnourished, disoriented bee carrying mites could end up infecting a whole new colony. “It’s like having the flu and going on a crowded subway. Bees spread disease the same way.”
Jammed in tight, The bees set out for the almond groves of california to begin their whirlwind pollination tour.
Inbreeding then provides the devastating final insult to the bee colonies. The looming genetic crisis made its first blip on the entomological radar more than a decade ago, after Sheppard began comparing the mitochondrial DNA of commercial and feral queens. The differences were stunning. About 30 percent of bees in the 700 feral colonies he studied showed traces of genetic code from northern European ancestors, compared with just 2 percent in commercial stock. “It was a genetic bottleneck,” he says. And the problem persists. A study published by Sheppard in July revealed that breeders use only 500 select mothers annually to produce almost a million queen bees, which then get shipped out to lead commercial hives. Making matters worse, the severe loss of wild honeybees due to mite infestation virtually eliminates any chance that feral drones will mate with commercial queens and liven up the gene pool.
Mattila explores the grim effects of loss of genetic variety in the glass-walled bee colonies she keeps in her lab, where video cameras capture it all—bees building honeycombs, producing honey, rearing offspring, doing waggle dances. One of her studies compared colonies having 15 different drone fathers (similar to the natural state) with those having only one. The more diverse colonies stored more honey, spent more time foraging, and experienced faster growth; the single-father colonies could not even amass enough supplies to survive a winter. “They’re not aggressive. They don’t communicate, their approach to food is lackluster, and they don’t put on weight,” Mattila says.
In response to the sharp decline in commercial bee populations, scientists and beekeepers like Comfort are working to wind back the clock. “It’s all about diversity,” he says. After years in industrial beekeeping, he had an epiphany in 2007 while sitting on an elk path in Montana thinking about the situation: dead bees, missing bees, mites thriving on chemical strips meant to kill them. He decided to pack it in and head back East. He drove to Dutchess County in the truck he now lives in, with an empty honeycomb dangling from the mirror and a Montana license plate that read BEESWAX.
Today Comfort shuttles around in his truck, fetching hives out of local squirrel houses, conducting a one-man breeding project. His goal is not to furnish the large-scale migratory beekeepers with more robust stock but rather to create an infrastructure of small-scale beekeepers. After he collects a new colony, he monitors it for a while, watching to see if it survives the winter, resists pathogens, and produces a good amount of honey. The ones faring well are the keepers. He uses the progeny from those hives to establish new queens, then sells those queens to local beekeepers, mostly hobbyists who “just want to let the bees do their thing.”
Fortunately, Comfort is not alone. Michael Burgett is doing similar work in his lab space at Oregon State. Firemen and other locals call him up when they come across feral hives, and Burgett snaps them up. He hangs on to queens from hives that survive the stress of winter and mates them with bees from other healthy colonies. At North Carolina State University, entomologist Debbie Delaney is lending a hand as well, seeking out feral colonies that have survived the spread of the varroa mite in the hope that she will find genes that confer resistance.
Slowly, beekeepers like Comfort and Burgett are trying to ease bees away from their troubled state, allowing them to drift back toward a healthier, more natural way of life. “Bees have been doing this for 80 million years,” Comfort says. “All we have to do is get out of their way.”
