honeybees Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

“I would recommend more intake of pure honey, nature’s pure food that we get from the bees.” This comment came from a faithful reader, after I wrote about tea with honey for throat issues. Faithful Reader Alvin Huie went on to mention the fact that honey has “the most nutrients, antioxidants, vitamins, etc” of many of the foods we consume.

A few minutes later I picked up my mail. It included an appeal from the good people at EarthJustice, pleading eloquently for help in saving the bees. I took this as an omen that bees of the world need a blog.

You have to love the people at EarthJustice, an environmental nonprofit with the pretty wonderful motto: Because the Earth Needs a Good Lawyer. Indeed. Bees too, apparently. It’s possible to find all sorts of opinions and data sets, depending on who (such as, agricultural products industries v environmental nonprofits) is furnishing the information. The banning of some bee-killing pesticides in the past may have somewhat slowed the scary decline in world bee populations, but I’ll go with this report from Earthday.org. Its March 2022 Fact Sheet says, among other things, that “there are 20,000 distinct bee species around the world, with 4,000 of them in the United States alone. From 2006-2015, approximately 25% fewer species were found. Under the best scenario, thousands of bee species have already become too rare.”

For an inside look into the world of bees I turned to Alvin – who happens to be an old friend and new(ish) neighbor. Now entering his 90s, Alvin is retired from an IT career and from active beekeeping (after 25+ years.) But he has kept track of all things bee-related since first getting hooked in 1994. “It’s a low-key hobby,” he says. And a lot of good fun. He attended week-long world bee conventions in S. Korea, Argentina, Ukraine and elsewhere. He reads bees books, introduces others to beekeeping and belongs to several apian organizations. There is a LOT to know and share about bees. To help with which there is Apimondia, an international federation of beekeepers’ organizations and related others that’s been around since 1895.

Bees themselves however, bless their little apian hearts, don’t exactly enjoy lives of leisure and self-indulgence. According to their friend Alvin, the average worker bee lives about six weeks max. The drone, whose primary purpose is to mate with the queen – or help with temperature control by flapping his (larger) wings along with all the others – might live for around 30 days. But if he’s successful in beating out a few thousand fellow drones – they don’t fight about it! They just try to get closest to her – and mating with the queen, he immediately dies. What can I say? Queenie herself might live for a year or two, but during the springtime (her busiest season) she’s laying about 1500 eggs per day. All of this may be why you never hear people saying “it’s a bee’s life.”

Still. All those apian friends of ours – in the remaining 20,000 species – are critical to our survival. While we humans are hardly noticing, they are pollinating, without which activity we would lack most of the fruits, vegetables and other good things we live on. Or promoting biodiversity, or making honey or creating all that great wax we use. All of which requires, well, being as busy as bees for their entire lives.

You may want to thank a bee today.

Richard Fagerlund is a man you can trust. Politicians, bankers, automotive industry executives… you can’t always be sure; but you ask a question of Richard Fagerlund and you’re going to get a straightforward answer. He gets a lot of questions. Fagerlund, AKA The Bugman, is a syndicated columnist, author and entomologist who has been involved with pests and pesticides for about four decades. He fields questions, in a column (Ask The Bugman) with a large and trusting audience, about pesky flies and persistent termites and uninvited bedbugs and more. He will tell you how to get rid of them, but you still get the feeling he would never squash one with malice, or consider one less worthy than humankind. He opposes cruelty in any form, to animals of any size.

Thus, when the issue of honey bees (good) v electromagnetic radiation (potentially evil) was raised, it was no surprise that The Bugman would come down firmly on the side of the bees. Turns out, this might be an issue with broad implications for us all. A reader asked The Bugman, several days ago, about a report that cell phones are a cause of colony collapse disorder in honeybees. (Honeybees do more than make honey. Think oranges, lemons and blackberries for starters.)

It is my contention that the main cause of colony collapse disorder in honeybees is from pesticides. Another reason for the population decline in honeybees is believed to be electromagnetic radiation that is emitted from cell phones and wireless towers. According to an article published in the Times of India, a study in Kerala found that cell phone towers caused a rapid decline in their honeybee population and that they could cause a complete collapse of the bee population in 10 years. Dr. Sainuddin Pattazhy, who conducted the study, concluded that the electromagnetic waves from the towers shorted out the navigational abilities of the worker bees so they couldn’t find their way back to their hive after collecting pollen.

A study conducted at Landau University in Germany showed that when cell phones were placed near hives, the bees wouldn’t return to them. Scientists believe the radiation generated by the cell phones was enough to interfere with the bees’ communication system, which are movement patterns, with their hives.

I doubted the contention that cell phones were detrimental to bees when I first heard it. But studies have shown that the electromagnetic fields have an impact on other species as well, including migratory birds that lose their orientation in the radiation.

If the electromagnetic radiation can affect birds, then there is no doubt in my mind it can affect insects as well, including honeybees. We also need to be concerned about our own species. At one time we were convinced that cigarette smoking was harmless. We were wrong with cigarettes, and we need to look carefully at electromagnetic radiation.

The writer of this space, a chain smoker for 20+ years (thankfully long past) and currently a city walker regularly threatened with sudden death by cell phone wielding drivers, comes down firmly on the side of The Bugman and the bees.

Cell phones’ waves found to disorient honeybees.

Tag: honeybees

On Being Kind to the Bees

Birds, Bees and Cell phones