WILMINGTON — Over the past several years there has been quite the buzz about bees. With issues like colony collapse disorder killing off these helpful pollinators people have started to realize that without bees, humanity would be at risk of running out of food — but there is good news, according to one local beekeeper, the trend seems to be reversing (at least a little bit).
Eric Thompson and his wife first started beekeeping after seeing their friends keeping beehives in their yard — they decided to give it a shot and have been beekeeping ever since.
Want to give it a shot?
So how does one get started in beekeeping? Well, Thompson recommends checking out a local group like the New Hanover County Beekeepers to get going. Cape Fear Community College also offers introductory courses on beekeeping as well.
There’s plenty of benefits to keeping your own bees, from homegrown honey and beeswax to helping pollinate plants around the area, but like other hobbies, beekeeping is not without risk.
According to Thompson, a single hive can have upwards of 10,000 bees, that’s a lot of chances to get stung, but despite the odds, with the proper equipment and precautions that chance is minimal. Thompson said he estimates he has been stung around 10 times in more than a decade.
It might come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with beekeeping but the bees are not actually locked safely inside their apiaries, instead, they are free to explore, forage, and pollinate on their own schedule.
Long live the queen
Life at the beehive is not all fun and games though; each bee has a specific duty to carry out, and at the top of the chain of command is, of course, the queen bee.
“The queen actually sets the mood of the hive with her pheromones,” Thompson said.
But, just like Marie Antoinette, if a colony is unhappy with royalty, the outcomes could be disastrous for her.
“If the bees don’t like her or something is wrong with her, maybe she gets damaged they will kill her and build a new queen,” Thompson said.
When Thompson says ‘build’ another queen, he means just that. The queen lays all the eggs in a colony and depending on the care given to each particular egg the outcome of each bee changes. Specialized nurse bees can feed a nutrient known as royal jelly to certain larvae instead of the usual diet of pollen and honey fed to drones, and this aids in their becoming queens (royal jelly is also used to feed adult queens). So the bees can, in essence, create a new queen.
Bee benefits, and bouncing back
While there are some people who are dangerously allergic to bees, bees, in general, provide humans (and other animals) with lots of benefits — namely the pollination of crops. Without pollinators there are plenty of plant species that could not continue to reproduce, Thompson said.
“They are one of the biggest pollinators of our food, is the main thing. It has gotten better, as far as the honey bee population and the general pollinator population. In the 80s there was a lot of colony collapse disorder. Commercial beekeepers were losing thousands of hives and they didn’t know why,” he said.
The problem with this was that most of these commercial operations were pollinator hives that would be transported to farms where crops needed to be pollinated in the spring.
But there is some good news. Thompson said he thinks the once-declining population is on the upswing, in part due to the fact that people have taken notice of the importance of bee populations.
One of the biggest threats and ironies for Thompson is the fact that we need bees to help create food yet farmers consistently spray their crops to keep bugs off of the food.
“The bees come, they find food, then they die because they have been sprayed,” he said.
For those interested in helping the local bee population, Thompson said using as little amount of chemicals as possible when treating plants is beneficial.
Those interested in beekeeping can visit the New Hanover County Beekeepers Association.
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