The buzz on bees

Apiaries here are feeling the sting of the worldwide decline in bee populations.

By MAURICE PICOW
Workers at beehives 521 (photo credit: Courtesy Yosi Slavetski)
Workers at beehives 521
(photo credit: Courtesy Yosi Slavetski)
Yom B’Kfar in Moshav Mishmeret near Tel Mond is the Israel Honey Council’s primary visitors’ center.
Established 23 years ago by Gidi and Mili Magen, the center gives visitors an up-close look into the lives of honeybees and the important role these insects play in the pollination of fruit and vegetables, as well as in the production of honey and honey products.
The Magens, both in their 70s, have been living in Mishmeret for more than 40 years. Gidi Magen learned the art of beekeeping at Mikve Yisrael Agricultural High School, and has been involved with beekeeping for nearly 48 years. He began raising bees in the days when only the Tnuva Agricultural Cooperative was distributing honey products in Israel and exporting them. Mili Magen, a former high school teacher, helps her husband at the bee farm, even though she is allergic to bee stings.
“My husband had two choices from the beginning: either change his profession or change his wife. He decided to stick with both of them for all these years,” she says.
After experiencing an economic crisis in the mid-1980s they began working with Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, now the largest honey products distributor in Israel. They decided to establish the Yom B’Kfar visitors’ center in 1989.
With nearly half a century of beekeeping under their belts, the Magens have witnessed the industry’s ups and downs. As bee populations decline worldwide, Metro took a tour of the Magens’ farm to find out how this country’s apiaries are faring.
A TOUR of the bee farm with Mili Magen began with her pointing out a number of flowering plants around which bees could be seen gathering pollen.
“Some flowers and flower colors attract more bees than others. Some of these include basil, jasmine, geraniums, sunflowers and others such as myrtle,” she says.
Mili adds that various types of flowers and tree blossoms determine the color and taste of the honey the bees produce.
“Citrus blossoms and sunflowers make honey that is light brown and very sweet. Wildflowers make honey that is darker and less sweet,” she says, adding that avocado blossoms make a dark brown honey, and eucalyptus trees a brown to dark brown honey.
Each plant group at the center is marked with a sign that explains the plant or tree’s attraction for bees.
When asked about blossoms of fruit trees like cherry and apple, Gidi says that these trees do not really provide pollen and are more for producing fruit.
“Citrus and eucalyptus trees are much better for making honey,” he says.
“There used to be a lot more eucalyptus trees in Israel. They were brought here for various reasons, including production of wood and for draining swamps by the early pioneers,” he explains.
But one of the biggest problems with raising bees in Israel, he says, is not fewer plants, but a lack of open space.
“We take beehives to the Golan Heights in the summer and the bees live there until the fall. The Golan is very good for bees as there are a lot of wildflowers there and not very many people,” he says.
ACCORDING TO Herzl Avidor, director of the Israel Honey Council (IHC), the troubles affecting bee colonies worldwide are a significant issue in Israel as well. Especially problematic is the syndrome known to farmers and beekeepers as Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD, which is at the center of research being carried out by a Rehovot-based company, Beeologics.
“We don’t really know what the real cause of CCD is, except that it may be caused by a virus or other problem, including parasites. The exact cause has not been discovered yet. The [associated] virus, called Israel Acute Paralysis Virus or IAPV, could also be connected to a problem with the bee’s DNA, which has been affected by use of pesticides and various forms of pollution,” he says. “I believe that all of these syndromes affecting the bees come from external conditions, including global warming and climate change, pesticides and various forms of pollution.”
Regarding pesticides, Avidor says that most of these used to be sprayed onto trees and flowering plants, but are now systemic, i.e. introduced into the plant system or into the soil itself. The bees are thus exposed to the pesticide when they gather the plant’s pollen or nectar.
He also thinks that various types of pollution, especially air pollution caused by vehicles, industries and soil and water pollution harm the bees and upset their genetic codes.
Avidor adds that the number of bee colonies in the US has dropped by about 20 percent in the past 30 years, partly due to a reduction in trees and plants the bees gather pollen from, especially citrus trees and cotton plants. Here, honey yields have dropped in in the same period from around 40 kg. per hive to 20 kg.
“Cotton is a very important food source for bees because it flowers in July and early August when many other flowers are not available.
Cotton production in Israel has dropped from 600,000 dunams [150,000 acres] in the 1970s to only about 80,000 dunams today. This is due to the price of cotton falling considerably and making planting it not worthwhile.”
YOSI SLAVETSKI, a bee development and pollination expert with the Agriculture Ministry, says that what is happening now to bees and bee colonies is a combination of a number of factors, including CCD as well as diseases and mites such as varroa, a parasitic mite that attacks and eats bee larvae.
“The medications developed by companies like Beeologics were sold to a parent company [Monsanto in the US] and are now being used there to try to find solutions to conditions like CCD, which are destroying so many bee colonies. Today, we are still trying to find the correct treatments.”
Slavetski thinks parasites like varroa are so serious that if something isn’t done, bees could become extinct.
This parasite was discovered in Israel in 1984 and as a result, apiarists are growing bee larvae themselves in order to ensure that there will be enough bees for pollination, which is the bee’s most important task.
“We are raising baby bees like poultry farmers are raising baby chicks,” he says.
He adds that although there are “various treatments” to fight the parasitic mites that cause so much damage to bee colonies, as yet, none of them is 100% successful.
“We need bees for pollination more than for honey,” he explains, as without the bees “the future of agriculture will be highly at risk.”
Beeologics was founded in Rehovot in 2007, and since 2011 belongs to the Monsanto Group of companies.
It conducts research on the disorders that have been causing a serious global decline in bee populations, from parasites to diseases, including CCD syndrome.
“Honeybee diseases have been a global concern since the worldwide introduction of the varroa mite and its associated virus complex. In this regard, Israel has not escaped these diseases, and more intensive management is required. Notwith-standing, honeybee diseases are naturally sporadic and affected by multiple parameters. Beeologics is taking a systematic approach and developing products to target both the varroa and virus complex. This may take several years to develop, but we envision this could be a powerful strategy both Israel and elsewhere to combat bee disease,” says Nitzan Paldi, Beeologics’s technical operations officer.
BACK AT Yom B’Kfar, Gidi Magen explains that the most common type of honeybee in Israel is the Italian bee, as it is a being a superb honeycomb builder and more physically suited for the Mediterranean climate.
“Bee colony density is very high here due to Israel being a small country.
There are now 6,200 locations in Israel with bee colonies. The most favorable locations are in the coastal regions, the Galilee and the Golan Heights. Up to 40 hives make up each bee colony,” says Avidor.
We enter a hall where sections contain explanations about how bees are hatched and develop and how honey is made. Also on display are various types of beehives, including those from Africa and other parts of the Mediterranean, as well as ones used over 150 years ago here in Israel.
“A group of early pioneers was sent to settle in the Rishon Lezion area; and they were taught to be beekeepers,” Mili says.
The next tour stop is what Mili refers to as the “Safari bee exhibit,” where people can watch from a protected enclosure and see the bees coming and going from the hives.
“Bees take off and land from their hives much like airplanes do. When worker bees arrive at the hive, other bees ‘test’ them to make sure they belong to that hive. If they don’t, they are attacked and killed,” Mili says.
Another exhibit is a section of an actual working hive where one can see the pollen being deposited by the bees who “dance” in a circle while depositing their pollen. Other bees can be seen flapping their wings very fast to “fan” the hive to keep it cooler.
In another hive section, the queen bee can be seen depositing eggs in empty cells.
“Only the queen can lay eggs, even though the worker bees are all female – except for the drones [male bees whose only function in life is to mate with the queen bee]. Worker bees only live about six to eight weeks. Queens can live as long as five years. When queens get old, they either die or go off to form a new hive,” says Mili.
As the tour ends, Gidi Magen says that while there are many challenges facing the beekeeping industry worldwide, in his opinion the main problem when it comes to honey production in Israel is simply lack of space.
“Israel is a small country and 92% of the land is already developed,” he says, adding that due to less honey being produced, some food companies are now importing honey from Eastern European counties such as Bulgaria and Romania.
In addition, Gidi Magen says that there are now only about 500 beekeepers left in Israel and that many bee colonies are used for fertilization, instead of making honey. Mili Magen adds that none of their five children want to continue making honey.
“One of our sons takes beehives to the Negev and Arava areas to farmers there so they can fertilize their crops. He makes more money doing this than he would make by producing honey.”
However, according to IHC director Avidor, “A lot more serious work needs to be done; both in the fields of bee diseases [there are many of them besides CCD] and natural and man-made problems that are depleting bee colonies. We must all realize that one-third of all agricultural products are the result of pollination by bees. This means that around NIS 2.5 billion worth of agricultural produce is the result of bees.”


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