Deep within the fertile Almaden Valley, Kenneth McKenzie walked with a beehive in his hand. He wasn’t worried about getting stung. The hive — and the bees within it — was no longer alive.
Rather than discarding it, McKenzie, president of the Santa Clara Valley Beekeeper’s Guild, on Jan. 30 brought the hive to Mountain View High School, where he, a group of ESL students and Roger Quinlan, a master beekeeper from Montana, pulled it apart and examined the dead bees under a microscope to see what might have killed them.
“We’re doing a beecropsy,” McKenzie said.
Bees are feeling the sting of population decline countrywide, scientists say, and the list of potential causes of death reads like a science fiction movie: parasitic mites, starvation, pesticides. Beekeepers and scientists are scrambling to find out why.
Just last winter, the U.S. honeybee population — worth $15 billion to the U.S. economy — plummeted by 44 percent, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In California, native bee species also took a big hit in the last few years, said Gordon Frankie, a research entomologist at the UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab. The five-year drought, which limited nectar production, should take part of the blame, he added.
But it’s not the only threat. Lack of plant diversity, climate change, parasites and pesticide exposure also play a role, said Georgia Parham of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Pesticide exposure has been grabbing scientists’ attention a lot recently, McKenzie said, adding that it’s given scientists and advocates an opportunity to educate others about bee conservation.
Synthetic pesticides have been around since the discovery of DDT in 1939. But neonicotinoid pesticides, which are cousins of nicotine, are only 23 years old. When bees began declining at alarming rates nationwide in 2006, scientists began to wonder if “neonics” — once deemed benign compared to their potent predecessors — were partly to blame, said Aimee Code, the pesticide program director at the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation organization.
On Jan. 17, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation announced it is expanding its pesticide monitoring network from six to eight counties, and testing for pesticides more extensively within the entire network. The expansion, which will be under effect until January 2018, follows a report by the Xerces Society about neonicotinoids in California’s surface waters.
Neonicotinoid sales increased drastically in California between 2014 and 2015; specifically, the sales of dinotefuran and clothianidin, two neonicotinoid-based pesticides, increased over 470 percent, the Xerces Society reported. Neonicotinoids are also found in at-home landscaping products, outdoor building products, and flea and tick medicine for cats and dogs throughout the state. Just recently, they were approved for rice farm application, the report adds.
California has higher concentrations of neonicotinoids in its surface water than any other state, and over 1 million acres of Californian farmland were sprayed with the neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid in 2012 alone, the Xerces Society reported.
But Jeffrey Donald, the deputy director of crop science at Bayer — one of the leading producers of neonicotinoid pesticides — said that “when used according to the label, neonics don’t present a risk to honeybee colony health.”
“For nearly every registered use, the EPA found that there is no risk to long-term colony health,” Donald said. “And for those where they’ve identified potential risk — some uses for cotton and citrus, for example — there are specific mitigations for use that eliminate that risk.”
McKenzie agrees that bees exposed to neonicotinoids might not die, but he believes it can weaken them and make them more vulnerable to other threats. Exposure to the pesticide can make bees more susceptible to contracting parasites and disease, said Claire Kremen, a researcher and co-director of the Berkeley Food Institute.
“It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” McKenzie said.
Experts are hoping to counter the bee decline through public education — to make people appreciate bees rather than fear them.
“We know the bees respond as long as there are good gardens out there,” said Frankie of UC Berkeley’s Urban Bee Lab.
The lab has worked with native bees and the greater community for over a decade. With help from the USDA, Frankie and his team held 61 educational workshops last year to teach the general public about bees.
His favorite tools? Data posters and photography.
“We have these incredible photographs of bees close up, and they get a chance to see what the fine detail of the bees are,” Frankie said, adding that once people see bees as “individuals,” they have more compassion for them.
The Urban Bee Lab also collaborates with 16 farms across Brentwood and Ventura — where its scientists plant gardens full of native bee attractants — and samples native bees and plant species throughout the East Bay. Its scientists, as well as Code, have found that people living in urban areas typically use fewer pesticides than their rural counterparts and are more receptive to going pesticide-free.
“People in urban areas can really help these species,” Parham said. “It doesn’t hurt to put out flowering plants where the bees can use them.”
But McKenzie believes California’s youth may hold the most promise for protecting bees.
At Mountain View High School, the students in Lyudmila Shemyakina’s science class morphed into forensic pathologists. They eagerly smushed bee body parts between microscope slides and studied McKenzie’s dead hive, noticing that some bees were snagged — headfirst — in the hive’s cells. A lack of pollen and honey suggested that this hive died of starvation, not pesticides.
“The beekeepers did a wonderful job,” Shemyakina said.
The small lesson is one of many ways bee experts can educate the public, and perhaps even more importantly, help bees.
“Most were pretty interested,” McKenzie said of the students. “They were engaged, they laughed, because you want to keep learning fun.”
