I’m a fan of British TV shows, and my Netflix queue is a veritable who’s who of BBC, Channel 4, and the rest. One thing I find especially pleasing in the shows’ set design is the prevalence of beehives around ordinary houses.
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Young Amelia Pond stands in front of beehives as she discovers Doctor Who’s crashed TARDIS in the garden.
In the States, we call it backyard beekeeping and urban beekeeping, but the sensibility is the same – integrating the care and maintenance of a hive or two into the routines of our urbanized lives. But given the enormous threats honeybees are facing in North America today, urban beekeeping may be the best way to save the bees.
There is good and growing evidence that the mystery killer of beehives across North America is the result of exposure to a particular class of pesticides, neonicotinoid poisons that persist in treated plants, and in the edible portions bees bring home to the hive. Colony Collapse Disorder is characterized by the sudden disappearance – often over the winter – of most of the hive’s population, while stores and brood remain intact. The queen is often still present, but the hive’s population has crashed below recoverable levels, and the colony is doomed.
These types of pesticides are unfortunately present in agricultural communities, and migratory beekeepers – those who cart their hives from state to state, following the pollination schedule from almonds in California in February, zigzagging across America to provide pollination to monocrop tracts of blueberries, cranberries, and more – may inadvertently be exposing their bees to higher levels of environmental poisons, as well as vectoring disease through the sheer number of hives that mingle.
To put it as plainly as I can: Industrial agriculture is bad for bee health.
Enter the backyard beekeeper, the urban beekeeper, the hobbyist with the hive or a few. Ironically, it’s in the urban environment that bees may experience less health stress, and by managing only a few colonies, usually without a profit motive, urban beekeepers can focus on hive health and experiment with production of natural queens, instead of purchasing queens and restricting bee genetics to commercial lines.
In the era of varroa mite, Colony Collapse Disorder, climate change, and all the other threats that honeybees face, it’s nice to think that those of us in the hive-like setting of a modern city may hold the key to saving the bees.
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Maybe while Amelia Pond waited for the Raggedy Doctor’s return, she could have leveled that hive.
