By Camas Frank
Local beekeeper, John Chesnut, isn’t exactly a shy guy, but he doesn’t wear his resume on his sleeve, at least not when he’s away from a hive.
A field botanist with studies ranging from the High Sierras to SLO County, his expertise in the field of bee keeping and how it’s carried out in agriculture predates the killer bees scare, the invasion of mites in local colonies and modern use of neonicotinoid pesticides.
That made him perfect for an evening presentation to a recent gathering of Central Coast STEM’s Science After Dark meeting held at Luis Wine Bar in SLO.
The group works to raise interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, while encouraging their integration in elementary school curriculums. So while Chesnut works with Cal Poly to train the next generation of teachers on adding agriculture (along with bees) and science into the curriculum of fourth graders, the group also arranged for him to give a lesson on just what his hives are up to the rest of the time.
Lesson one, if honeybees are swarming, don’t freak out. The movement of the drones in a massive cloud surrounding a queen on her way to new digs is really a bunch of pheromone-drunk little guys too gorged on food for the voyage to be interested in you. Close the windows anyway though.
Just in case anyone was wondering, the honeybees that we know and love are an “Old World” species, not native to North America at all, but they have come to be the basis for our mass production system and humans carting them around is very much part of that.
There are, however, thousands of native bee species, including lots of variety in the urban fringe zones around San Luis Obispo. That’s down to more niche environments for species to exist in than on the open range or in areas with only kept pollinators.
It may be, Chesnut notes, that human dependence on kept hives for our cornucopia of vegetables is in the public eye now, but native bees are important too.
Human history with these social insects with larger than average brains and strange “waggle dances,” goes back 27 million years, when an ecological niche opened up in the division of continents. The ancestors of modern bees emerged in the same blink of an eye, in geologic terms, which saw primates finding niches in new environments.
According to the fossil record, after finding a model that worked, the bees changed a heck of a lot less in the time that it took for modern man to branch away from other mammals.
Current theory suggests, Chesnut said, that it’s the social behaviors that the honeybees developed early on that kept them from breaking away from the 11 species we know now. While the European variety has been exported to the Americas and throughout Northern Eurasia, the sugar loving European’s that learned how to keep hives got the short end of the metaphorical stick. Classic Mayan honeybees, records of which are found depicted in ancient temple artwork, were a stingless variety.
As humans preyed on the hives found in trees, they learned about the social organization inside the hives, and ancient cultures drew parallels for possibly ideal organization of human societies (ancient Egyptians show them in hieroglyphs).
Chesnut said that keeping of the critters in baskets started as a growth method that lasted through the Middle Ages and was common in Europe until World War II. The basket method had the disadvantage that harvesting the honey by crushing and killing an entire hive and starting over again with a newly caught queen next season.
With some scientific acumen, a different way of cultivation was thought up in the U.S. in 1852. Measurements of the space needed for bees to move inside a hive were made preventing automatically get filled with wax combs, led to a design still used today — with removable wooden slats and boxes.
Thus modern keepers really do care about the fate of each individual hive and are careful to allow rebuilding and maintenance in their schedules.
So, down to the hot topic of the day. Are bees disappearing, if yes why, and what can be done?
Well yes, said Chesnut, there are issues with hive numbers, but they follow human economic trends. Much of what we do to them isn’t the best practice for happy healthy hives. For instance monocultures — bees need more than one amino acid source. When bees are trucked to the almond orchards, a practice keeping the entire production of a valuable crop alive in the Central Valley, then left without other food sources in holding areas, they naturally return to the last known place where they could get something to eat. That proved disastrous this year, as some hives returned to orchards, Chesnut said, which had been treated with pesticides after pollination.
Human market demand for certain cash crops has led to practices not in the long term benefit, he asserts, but that doesn’t mean we remedies aren’t at hand. One being pursued is for large agricultural producers to directly own their own hives and control the conditions their bees are exposed to, rather than relying on a lease and rental system run by individual keepers and companies.
Other issues have longer-term consequences, Chesnut said, such as the introduction of “round-up ready” crops or the neonicotinoid generation of pesticides from the 1990s. It will take time for the environments treated to work the water-soluble neurotoxins out of the local environments, Chesnut said.
In short, multiple stressors – toxins, pesticides and parasites — have led to the death of colonies. The social insects that have stayed essentially unchanged for millions of years aren’t well suited to adapt, but Chesnut said we could do something for local industry.
For example in greenhouse pollination, bumble beehives can be adapted to the indoors. They have one advantage in that they learn the ceiling is there and don’t bump against the glass interminably the way a honeybee will.
Chesnut also presented a new concept in local honey cultivation — having direct-from-the-hive honey tastings for artisanal varieties, the way wine and olive oil have developed.
“It’s being done on the East Coast but hasn’t gotten popular here yet,” he said, while taking people’s tasting notes on detectable flavors. “In the South, varieties with high fructose are very popular now. It’s not a California thing yet but it can be something that saves our local bees.”
Another solution practiced in New Zealand is to promote multiple flower varieties in vineyards and other mixed agriculture areas. Not only are the flowers attractive to wedding parties, it also happens to be great for bees. Promotion of the California poppy, he suggests, would be a popular move, as well as providing a habitat for bees, wasps and natural predators for other pests. For information about his projects, Chesnut can be reached at 459-1050. The next Science After Dark event at Luis Wine Bar will be March 11, focusing on Marine Ecology.
