Honey bees are in trouble across Pa.

(Harrisburg) — “Honey bees are in trouble,” a pamphlet at the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association (PSBA) booth at the 2017 state farm show proclaimed.

A former PSBA president reinforced that proclamation.

“Statewide, we are holding our own, but we have to replace our bees frequently,” Charlie Vorisek, president of the PSBA from 2012 to 2016, said. “We probably bring in over $1 million worth of honey bees from the south every spring to replace our dead-outs.”

There are currently more beekeepers in the state now than there were four years ago, as well as more hives, according to Vorisek.

“We went from 40,000 hives to 63,000,” Vorisek said. “However, we still have winter losses of usually around 50 percent of our bees.”

Gary Carns, a beekeeper for almost 50 years, agreed that the number of beekeepers and hives in the state is misleading.

“If you had cattle, and you lost 40 or 50 percent every year, it would be outrageous,” Carns said. “With our bees, people think it’s just a little bug, so who cares, but they are vital to us.”

While the production of the honey the bees produce is integral to the businesses run by Vorisek and Carns, it is what the bees do for other crops that makes their survival so important.

“You would still have crops without honey bees. Honey bees are not native to North America,” Vorisek said. “Our ability to pollinate the crops sees an exponential increase in a crop’s yield. That’s why we do it.”

“You do not need a honey bee for strawberries, but you’re going to get more strawberries, and you’re going to get bigger strawberries with honey bees,” Carns said. “It’s the same with sour cherries.”

Full-time beekeepers like Vorisek and Carns will take their hives to farms at a farmer’s request to aid in pollinating their crops.

“I take bees in for zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cherries, apples, and there’s even one guy who asks me to bring them to his peach orchard,” Carns said. “Honey bees cover a huge gambit. With some crops, wind will do it, but bees will do a much better job.”

Loss of habitat – including plants that used to be packaged in with grass seed, but have recently been deemed weeds – and a problem with parasites are the main problems plaguing bees in recent years, according to Carns.

“Two things that were very important to bees in the past, and they used to be looked upon as a good thing, was dandelions and Dutch clover,” Carns said. “Now everyone spreads stuff to kill that. Now they say they are weeds. When we used to plant grass seed in the 1970s, it always had grass seed and 25 percent clover.”

The tendency to kill off the dandelions and clover in people’s yards has hurt the honey bee population, according to Carns.

“If you would just let dandelion or clover grow in your yard, it’s only there for a short period of time, and then it’s gone. That is going to benefit our bees,” he said. “Little things like that would be a big help. Bees are in desperate starvation mode until they see dandelion in the spring, so if you want to help out locally, don’t put chemicals on your yard.”

The advent of the Varroa mite in the United States in 1984 has also contributed to the honey bee’s plight. Varroa mites prey on larvae and weaken the honeybee with viruses and other diseases they bring with them, according to Carns.

“Right now, our big chemical of choice (for treating bees for Varroa mites) is oxalic acid, which is made out of turnips, radish leaves and stuff like that,” Carns said. “It is found naturally in honey, but since the word acid is in there, people get funny about using it in their beehive. But they are going to have dead bees without it.”

However, researchers in league with the PSBA are working on other ways to combat the mite problem.

“Our goal is to have as few chemicals in our hive as possible,” Vorisek said. “Pennsylvania and a few other states are working on a queen bee breeding program that selects bees that have Varroa-sensitive hygienics, and they remove the mites on their own. Long term, that would be the best solution, but it’s a slow process.”

“We are trying to pick bees that have traits toward cleanliness,” he said. “Some hives are much more hygienic that others.”

The PSBA is also working with researchers on finding new nutritional sources for honey bees.

“We are encouraging more pollinator gardens and crops, and Penn State’s Center for Pollinator Research is doing a good job finding those things, and is trying to identify more of them,” Vorisek said.

Nutrition is extremely important to the health of a hive.

“Bees don’t have a welfare program. If there’s no food coming in, then that hive is going to reduce laying eggs because they won’t starve themselves in the middle of summer,” Carns said. “But then they go into fall with a much smaller, older colony, and they are more susceptible to dying off.”

“With a new guy starting out, he is probably buying bees from the south, and unfortunately, over the period of years, there has been such a demand for doing that that the quality (of livestock) has been lowered,” he said. “Now you have a creature that doesn’t do well in our region, and they die out easily.”

When Carns began beekeeping with his father in the 1960s, hives didn’t require constant care to keep the honey bees alive.

“When I was a kid, you could put beehives out in the backyard, look at them once or twice in the summer and then go back in the fall to take a lot of honey off them,” he said. “Now, if you only look at them once or twice, you’ll go back in the fall and you’ll have a dead hive.”