BEES ARE DYING! Why are bees declining & disappearing???
Last year I finally got my first honey bee hive. I was more than ecstatic! Raising bees was something I had been wanting to do for quite sometime on the farm! I won't ever forget the day I got my honey bee hive delivered last year! And I believe my daughter was just as happy I was about the new bee colony!
Our new bee hive was strong. The bees were rocking & rolling. What started as a one deep & one medium, turned quickly into 2 deeps & 2 mediums & then that turned into a new smaller hive. Beekeeping & the health of my bees could not have been better. The bees were just taking care of their hive & the queen. Speaking of the queen bees, my queen bee was just awesome. She was laying so many eggs. I had so much bee brood & bee life & beekeeping was good.
I checked my have every week, but then I had a period where I did not check for a couple of weeks. And I remember walking up to it & seeing honey running down the outside of the bee box. I knew something was wrong. I immediately opened the beehive & there were hive beetle larvae everywhere. I started taking bee frames out, & sorting through them & putting the frames with signs of hive beetle larvae in a new bee box & when I got finished, all I had was 5 frames that were salvageable. I was devastated. My queen bee was either gone or dead. My once awesome beehive was no more.
My new struggling hive did make a new queen, but after 2 weeks they were dead. Me being a beekeeping rookie, I just blamed myself & just decided it was hive beetles, but after reading & talking with other beekeepers, hive beetles only take over or destroy a beehive when the bees are weak & can no longer protect the hive. So what made my bee colony weak? What caused my bees to decline so fast that they could no longer protect & keep pest such as hive beetles in check?
Well after some time passed, we talked to 3 local beekeepers, & they too had lost bees. 2 of which lost 75% of their bees & the other was almost a 100% loss of his bees. All right there in the same general area as us. And one of them had came to the conclusion it was from the county spraying the roadside with a poison. Either a pesticide or a herbicide. Then it jogged my memory. I remember seeing state or county workers walking down our county road, with backpack sprayers on, spraying. Now they were either spraying for zika virus or weeds. But it was right around the time I lost my bees & the time they lost their bees as well. So what happened was, one of these beekeepers called the county extension office & told them what had happened & the county told her that they would ad our county roads to a list & as long as we had beehives there, they would not spray the raodsides with poison. Now fast forward to the present. On my way back from work, I noticed all the county roads I travel to get home were starting to turn brown. It was obvious they had been sprayed with roundup or some other herbicide & god knows whatelse. I was very disheartening. Then 2 days later, we were riding down the road & got behind the big tanker truck, with the boom arm on the side, just spraying & drenching the raodsisdes with poison or herbicide. It was a terrible & scary sight. See bees typically travel a 2.5 mile radius from their hive, but can go as far as 7 miles. So just think about that. But after seeing the dying weeds on the raodsides & actually seeing the truck spraying the poison, I just do no think I can ever raise bees again! I just wish there were other options for the states & counties. What determines them to spray instead of cutting? I do not know!
Sources:
Study Shows Honeybees Are Starving Because Of Roundup:
https://goo.gl/paCAud
Groundbreaking study shows that Roundup causes honeybees to starve: https://goo.gl/Co3yQA
Emails show Bayer & Syngenta fought scientists for data on bees study: https://goo.gl/hfHv3o
Save the Bees-Be the solution to help protect bees in crisis: https://goo.gl/cGJPfs
Cog Hill Farm - 2017