Letters to the Editor
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The sadness of no bees...
I have read other articles about the hive dieoffs and felt a little sad as I love honey and bees, but reading Novella's haunting words about the loss of her hive almost had me in tears.
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nuc it
Novella I hope you buy a nuc (short for nucleus, 4 frames of bees ,brood and a new Queen). i f you get on it everything will get pollinated and you may even get a honey crop. I also lost alot of my bees this winter and I will be replacing them all with nucs. Hopefully we won't have to do this forever but for now...that's how to keep the buzz going. Good luck....David
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Missing bees
I never thought an article about missing bees would make me cry...
I hope they find the culprit for colony collapse and that it is not too late to save the bees who provide us with so many valuable foods and services.
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Truly heartbreaking
I love bees so much and have always wanted my own hive. Thank you for this beautiful article.
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This is a really big deal
Bees aren't decorative cute flying critters. They're critical to a big swath of agricultural products in the US. In NC bees are a 12+ million dollar a year business which controls more than 150 million dollars of crops per year. 95% of wild hives may disappear. The other onslaught to deal with are Africanized Honey Bees which can migrate easily into subzero climes.
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95 percent? huh?
I'm sorry, if 95 percent of the bees are gone, humanity itself is toast. Where did you get this number?
Nice piece. I'm starting my first beehive this year (in fact, my husband is in the other room pulling nails out of boards for our first two Top Bar Hives). Beekeepers in our area are not reporting any colony collapse, thank goodness.
Kay
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95% of wild hives
which is part of the stock of cultivated hives. Call up the NCSU ag extension.
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Los Angeles bees are missing, too...
Ordinarily, my rosemary and sage blossoms would be abuzz at this time of year. Nothing.
It's exactly the sort of subtle symptom that presages the downfall of civilization in science fiction novels.
And I recall hearing last year that the Maine blueberry harvest would be adversely affected by immense honeybee dieoffs there...
It's the kind of thing Vonnegut might have based one of his ironic post-apocalyptic visions upon. Ice-9 in insect form.
Are we paying attention yet?
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buzz Kill
Fortunately this isn't a completely commonplace occurrence yet. I live only a few miles from Novella, in Canyon, up in the east bay hills and have had no problems with any of my 5 hives..... yet. There was no mention of the beekeeper medicating her hive for varroa or tracheal mites, or for foul brook of wax moths? Did this happen? Mites have been killing colonies for going on 20 years and the empty hive is an end result of that problem.
The early research I've read is that this is mostly happening to commercial beekeepers with their thousands of hives that move from orchard to orchard fertilizing heavily pesticided (can that be a verb?) crops. There is however, no conclusive evidence in any one direction as of yet.
This was a lovely article about the joy of a backyard hive but hardly instructive about this burgeoning problem.
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My Sweet Sweet Salon
This article reminded me of the old Salon, circa 1996. I had read about this Colony Collapse Disorder but nothing could have brought it home better than this. True life, real stories, yum.
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Honey I'm home!
I hope that's the title of the next piece Novella publishes in Salon.
What a great essay. Nice to see something not about being a new mother or a worried mother or a working mother or a non-working mother.
We can learn life lessons in unikely places, and without a club. Good writing is in the eye of the bee-holder!
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Give me the hives!
We have two bee colonies, one occurred naturally in the hollow of an olive tree, the other we built a crude hive for when they had to be moved from an outdoor armoir where they'd settled. They've both been there for years, swarming occasionally but always leaving a crew behind to replenish the population. Lordy, I hope they don't go away. The bee guy who moved the second hive for us said that when most people call him because they have a swarm, they don't want him to remove them, they simply want them killed. Eek, a bee, it's gonna sting me!
People are hard to love, sometimes.
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What a sweet story!
It's sad, though. I've been reading a lot about the missing bees, too. It sounds like you've lost your pets. I'm sorry :(
Great essay. Thank you, Salon.
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Thank you for the . . .
. . . very lovely and heartfelt article. Reading it made me nostalgic for the old Salon, and for once it was nice to read an emotionally-tinged piece with a real poetic flair. What will spring bring this year in terms of the bee problem? I hope Salon keeps us updated.
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Thank You For Making My Morning
What a lovely, bittersweet essay. This is what I want from Salon's personal essays.
And on a serious note - first the frog and toad population collapse, then the fisheries collapse, now the bee population?
How far up the foodchain will the species collapses reach before we wake up?
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This is so sad
Luckily my bees have survived so far. I just gave them their first batch of sugar syrup this past weekend. It's amazing how we get so attached to the little critters. During the Summer I go out almost every day just to gaze at the hive and say hi. Hopefully the problem and solution will be found soon. When Varroa mites first became a problem, many beekeepers went through a similar die-off before the problem, and solution, was found. I have confidence that a solution will be found, not only for economic reasons, but because there is so much love for the whole process of beekeeping in so many people. A great book about beekeeping is "Robbing the Bees, A biography of Honey" by Holley Bishop. It's a history of beekeeping with persaonal experiences thrown in. It will kindle, or re-kindle, your love of beekeeping.
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over ten years
it's been over ten years since i've seen any honey bees in my neighborhood.