Leroy Cronkhite of East Livermore has been keeping bees since the 1970s. He gave up the bees for a few years when his daughter developed cancer. When he started beekeeping again, with just a few hives this time, it was as if he’d been hit by a ton of bricks.
“I never heard of mites,” he said of his earlier experience with beekeeping. “It’s a lot harder to keep bees now.”
The spread of two foreign species of mites by infested honeybees from Florida in the mid-1980s has severely challenged local honeybee populations and has changed the way beekeepers think about their work.
“You have to be a bee doctor now,” says Carol Cottrill of Rumford, who organizes meetings and disseminates information to members of the Western Maine Beekeepers Association, one of seven local beekeeping clubs in Maine. “The local bee clubs are more important than ever to educate and support hobby beekeepers trying to cope with increasing pressures from pests and diseases,” she said.
Cronkhite agrees.
He joined Western Maine Beekeepers to learn how to control the mites, and he found that he also wanted to share his own knowledge and experience with new beekeepers joining the group.
Bees are generally thought of as producers of honey, but their most important function is pollination. Honeybees are very effective pollinators of flowering fruit and vegetable crops and can greatly increase a yield for commercial growers.
Bee expert and Maine State Apiarist Tony Jadczak said more than 50,000 colonies of commercial honeybees have been trucked into Maine this year to pollinate blueberries, apples, squash, strawberries and canola.
Since early spring, these bees have been moved up the East Coast from grower to grower, for their pollinating prowess. They will return to Florida to work the citrus groves and melon farms this winter.
Jadczak said it’s the migration of commercial honeybees and shipment of bee stock by suppliers that is responsible for the spread of foreign mites into local bee populations. Once a hive is infected, it cannot survive more than a year or two without treatment.
Cronkhite recalled the ancient practice of obtaining a new colony of bees by following wild bees to their hive. The hive he located in a hemlock tree this spring is, he believes, a swarm that left his son’s hive last summer. Although he has high hopes for the survival of such a hardy colony, he’ll treat this hive with medications to protect them against mites just as he does his other hives.
He and his son Roy, editor of the Maine State Beekeepers Association newsletter, are hopeful that by applying common sense, a lot of keen observation and trial and error, they will one day be able to reduce the chemicals they now use to keep their hives alive.
Beekeepers are worried about their increasing dependency on chemicals to prevent mite infestation. With only a few treatment options available, the mite populations are showing a vigorous resistance to the chemicals and beekeepers are seeing greater losses, Jadczak said.
Despite these challenges, Jadczak notes a renewed interest in beekeeping by gardeners who are aware that without wild bee populations their gardens and orchards are not producing as well as they used to.
Students attending classes like those offered by the Western Maine Beekeepers Association are more frequently gardeners who want to keep bees for pollination in their own backyards.
Jadczak said he believes selective breeding of mite-resistant bees that are better adapted to local conditions, and management practices that include a variety of treatment options, are the best hope for the future of the honeybee.
“We keep moving things around the planet, and there are consequences, some good, some bad,” he said. “Small beekeepers play a valuable role by maintaining local populations of bees to provide pollination in their neighborhoods.”
For information about the Western Maine Beekeepers Association, contact Carol Cottrill at 364-0917.
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