Kaʻū News Briefs, Monday, September 23, 2019

Christina Rasmussen and Megan Denny, who finished third and first in the Women' 5K, with Kaʻū Coffee Queen  Helena Sesson, Princess Liliana Marques, and Miss Flower Kysha Manini Kaʻupu.  Emcee Eddie-O is far right. See more results below. Photo by Julia Neal

WILD BEES ARE RECOVERING ON HAWAIʻI ISLAND after a loss of about 99 percent of them over about eight years, says Allison Yahna. The bee expert said she is inspired by the expected recovery on this island and around the world, as people are becoming aware of the importance of bees in nature and for the survival of food for humans. She said there are many new beekeepers on this island.

     Earlier this month, Yahna, who founded Artimis Smiles Honey Bee Sanctuary in Kaʻū 20 years ago, took her daughter, VolcanoSchool of Arts & Sciences student Manu Yahna, to Montreal for Apimondia 2019, the world's largest conference on bees. They found that people from many countries are dedicated to reviving bee populations. Allison said she was most inspired by the number of folks interested in supporting local bees, adapted to their locale and evolving with genetic diversity to help fight off onslaught of disease.

Honeybees on a removable comb. Photo from Swarm Season

     She said that Hawaiʻi Island, in its isolation from the mainland, is like a laboratory with very little risk to bees until the last decade. "We were able to see, with the sudden onslaught of imported mites, beetles, and disease, that only the strong bees evolved and survived." Even though 99 percent of wild bees and 90 percent of commercial bees perished, "evolution worked," she said. "The weak died off. The strong had traits that allowed them to survive." She said that some bees with hygienic behavior were able to cull out infected brood, groom each other and remove mites, and self-medicate by dining on medicinal plants. Bees adapted by gathering antimicrobial resins and saps from plants to varnish the interiors of their hives, to keep out disease.

     Yahna said there are theories on the origin of the diseases that killed the bees here. Hawaiʻi, with its isolation from disease, became a popular place to mass produce queen bees to create hives that are used in large tracts of agriculture on the mainland. Hundreds of thousand of the queens are shipped to orchards that need pollination for almonds, rapeseed to produce canola, and other monoculture, industrial crops.

A honeybee, alighting on a flower near dawn. Photo from Swarm Season

     She said that mass producing queens, kept in cages without exposure to the elements and preventing their natural behavior of swarming to find a new home, make them weaker. They can lose the ability to resist disease. She said that beetles could have come onto the island through imported, used beekeeping equipment, soil, and imported fruit. The disease nosima C. could have arrived with imported semen to impregnate the queen bees. Mites could have come through shipments of queen bees, en route from New Zealand to the North American mainland, with a stop in Honolulu.

     If there were a wholesale crash of bees – here and on the mainland, there could be food shortage. "The food system in the U.S. needs pollination."

     Yahna said that the conference drew much interest in an approach toward locally sourced bees kept as wild as possible, living in a diversity of wild plants and crops in local, small scale agriculture systems for each community. Beekeepers would raise bees adapted to each community. She said that letting the bees evolve, while minimizing toxins and other threats to them, could be the best solution.

     "Everything the bees do, is the result of 30 million years of evolution." Humans, on the planet for a shorter time than bees, can learn from them, instead of trying adapt bees to a new system that is likely unsustainable," she said. She recommended the book, The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild.

A beekeeper, watching a swarm of honeybees. Photo from Swarm Season

     A keynote speaker at the convention was T.D. Seeley, of the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at CornellUniversity in Ithaca, New York.

     He explained the idea of Darwinian beekeeping, as an evolutionary approach that seeks to provide managed honey bee colonies with living conditions that are as close as possible to those of wild honey bee colonies. "The goal is to harmonize our beekeeping methods with the natural history of Apis mellifera," allowing bees to "make full use of the toolkit of adaptations that they have evolved over the last 30 million years." Seeley explained the pursuit of beekeeping "centered less on treating a bee colony as a honey factory and more on nurturing the lives of honey bees."

     Yahna said that the owner of Hawaiian Queen, a company on Hawaiʻi Island that produces queens for the mainland, attended the convention and is working with her on new approaches to raising queen bees in more sustainable environments. Contact beeoracal@gmail.com. See the trailer of Yahna's film, Swarm Season.