Local Beekeepers Working To Keep Honeybee Population From Collapse

The Argonaut, the Westside beach communities local weekly paper, had a great article this past week about local beekeepers that had me wondering how many people are aware of the massive bee die-off over the last decade and how it is affecting crops around the globe. Starting in the Fall of 2006, beekeepers in the United States began reporting losses of 30% to 90% of their hives. While colony losses are not unexpected, especially over the winter, the magnitude of recent losses has been unusually high. Honeybees pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the U.S., including the nearly $4 billion California almond crop now blooming in the Central Valley that depends on 1.4 million of the rented hives to grow the nuts. Honey bees pollinate roughly 1/3 of the food Americans consume, and we also eat over 400 million pounds of honey in America each year.

Colony Collapse Disorder is the name given to the mysterious condition decimating the honey bee population that is being blamed on everything from using a combination of certain pesticides to global warming to trucking hives of stressed out bees all over the place to pollinate. The Argonaut reports that the sudden and rapid decline of the bee population has gotten the attention of President Barack Obama, who had two hives installed at the White House garden this summer — making him the nation’s most high-profile urban beekeeper. In June, the President created a Pollinator Task Force to establish a federal strategy aimed at promoting the health of honeybees and other pollinators. The issue is serious enough that the task force issued a statement explaining that Honeybee pollination alone adds more than $15 billion in value to agricultural crops each year in the United States and the recent severe yearly declines have created concern that bee colony losses could reach a point from which the commercial pollination industry would not be able to adequately recover.

To that end, beekeepers have, for the past several years, celebrated National Honeybee Day to educate people about honeybees and promote efforts to keep them from extinction. This year’s National Honeybee Day is Saturday, Aug. 16, and the nonprofit L.A. beekeeper group Honey Love is marking the occasion with a party on Venice Beach. The event takes place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a group photo of participants at noon, near the lifeguard tower off Market Street near the Venice Skatepark. See you there?