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Have you noticed a shortage of honey bees in your garden the past few years? If so, you're not alone. The title for this page represents the single most common question we hear these days.
In fact, there are very few honeybees anywhere in North America today except where they are kept by beekeepers. This is a change that has occurred in the short space of 3 to 5 years in Santa Clara County, and about 15 years nationwide. Wild, or feral bees are almost nonexistent, and if you don't have an apiary nearby, you will not see honey bees in your garden. This is not due to pesticide abuse, or pollution, or the encroachment of civilization. These are problems that honey bees have coped with and adapted to very well.
The problem is a parasitic mite that's native to a different kind of bee in Asia. The mite, Varroa Jacobsonii, coexists with its native host fairly well. But European honey bees are totally defenseless against varroa, and a colony will die within 6 months to a year after its first exposure to the mites. Varroa has quickly spread across North America since its introduction about 15 years ago.
Beekeepers treat their bees with an EPA registered miticide that kills the mites but is harmless to the bees. This keeps the mites at bay, but does not totally eliminate them in managed colonies, and is the only reason European honey bees survive in most parts of the world today. And there are strains of Varroa in Florida, Italy and Japan that are showing resistance to this treatment, threatening beekeeping and agriculture with the possibility that European honey bees could soon be nearly extinct.
The absence of bees in your garden is due to 2 factors:
People who live near managed bee hives don't notice the shortage of bees, since the managed hives provide their neighborhoods with an adequate supply of foraging honey bees.
If you don't think the shortage of honey bees is a significant problem, consider that 1/3 of our food supply depends in part or in full on insect pollination, mostly from honey bees. Almonds, squash, mellons, many kinds of berries, and apples are just a few of the many crops that are highly dependent on honey bees, and several of these do not produce marketable fruit at all without adequate visits from the bees. If your garden is producing very little, or mishapen fruits and vegetables, look to see if you too have lost your honey bees.
Farmers rent bees because of the massive size of their fields. Even before the introduction of varroa, farmers rented bees because the fields are just too big to be adequately pollinated by the feral honey bee population. The importance of honey bees in successful food production is so great that for some crops, pollination service represents one of the highest cost single expense items in the production of the crop.
This massive migration brings bees from all parts of the country into close proximity, and as a result, pests and disease are spread rapidly to all the places where the exposed bees are moved after the almonds. Last year, Varroa mites were found in Florida and South Dakota that are resistant to Apistan, which is our only EPA registered defense against these mites. In random samplings of bee hives in the almond orchards this Spring, 50% of the hives had Varroa mites that are resistant. This means that many locations around the country will begin to show up with these "super mites" within the next year.
