HEAT WAVES, BEEKEEPING, AND YOUR BEES

Beekeeper Safety: Hold off on inspections, etc.

▪	Here is a link to the CDC page Heat and Outdoor Workers.

▪	Hydrate before you get thirsty and if you feel faint or weak, STOP all activity and get to a cool place.

▪	Here is the WMUR Heat Report.

▪	Good video: Heat Exhaustion vs Heat Stroke

How Hot Before Bees Can't Fly? Here is a link to a University of Maine Cooperative Extension article designed to help land maintenance activities avoid interfering with honey bee activity. It addresses minimum and maximum temperatures for flying: "The optimum temperature for flight activity is 72-77º F, but activity continues up to about 100º F before declining." If bees aren't active this could be why.

Bearding: The most important job in the colony is keeping brood at a temperature that allows for healthy development of the young, an average of 93F degrees. This means thermoregulation or fanning of cooled air when temperatures rise in the brood nest above 96F. Bees bring in water to help cool the air. To increase circulation the main body of worker bees in the hive will crawl out onto a shady hive surface. As long as you follow good apiary location guidelines your bees should have a healthy water source nearby. If not, try keeping a birdbath filled with clean water and stones for them to walk on. Then don't worry about it. They've got this. In extreme situations, your queen may stop laying until temperatures are safe for brood rearing.

Climate Change Study: Here is a link to a study on bees during a simulated heat wave: "In conclusion, we demonstrated that honeybees could remarkably adapt to heat waves without a cost at the individual level and on resource flow. However, ...(they struggle to recover) against additional environmental pressures."

How Many Hives is Too Many?

Navigating this can be tricky for a beekeeper. A land’s carrying capacity for beehives depends on many factors. Here are some answers to questions I get asked about almost weekly, especially by those who are new to navigating the land-use priorities of a rural community. Tom & I have lived year-round in the Ferncroft-Sandwich area for 24 years, the last four on this pretty little farm we bought realizing we needed more land to support my living as a beekeeper. After a two-year search, it ticked off most all the boxes for the bees.

How many colonies of bees are in a hive?

• A colony of honey bees is a family with a Queen Mother, and her daughters, who raise and care for each other and the Queen’s sons. Where’s Dad? Well, let’s just say a bee colony is a woman’s world.
• Commercial beekeepers may stack one box per family of bees on top of each other on a truck for transport to pollinate a crop; but those families of bees only have food during the crop’s bloom period so need to be moved afterward to survive.
• That is not how honey bee colonies on a farm are normally managed in our rural setting.
• One stationary beehive on a bee farm normally consists of several boxes stacked on top of each other that house one family of bees, but unlike commercial hives, also house one colony’s food.
• So if you see six separate stacks of several boxes on a bee farm, you are usually seeing six families of bees: Six Queens, their daughters, their sons, and their food. Sorry, Dads…

Land carrying capacity:

• A sustainable bee farm in our climate needs “forage” or flowers blooming from early spring to late fall that provide nectar & pollen. Bees make nectar into honey as their primary food, and pollen is made into “bee baby food”. A variety of nectars and pollens are essential for healthy bees. Gardeners make great beekeepers but the keen beekeeper either teams up with a gardener or quickly learns those skills.
• A bee’s consumption of honey to support its flight to collect food for the family breaks even at the 2-mile mark. Our non-competitive friends also practice a type of apiary fidelity: if two groups of hives are placed a mile apart the bees will normally only search for food up to a half mile in each other’s direction. It is in their nature as social insects, hard wired to cooperate, to also defer to other pollinators in a polite sort of “excuse me” dance. Of course, bees don't read the same books we do so behaviors will vary.
• For these reasons a bee farm should keep its bee families rich in food sources as close to the hives as possible. No mow May is just “no mow” or “strategically mowed” because wildflowers like mustards, clovers, dandelion, and prunella are extremely valuable background sources of pollen and nectar in-between major bloom events.

Seasonal Concerns

• Going into winter a colony is usually in a stack of about three boxes per colony on one hive stand.
• A colony in our climate might be confined for up to six months in the barren landscape of winter or too-cold-to-fly weather, consuming 10 lbs of honey on average per month to survive it.
• Pussy Willows are very valuable sources of food for bees in early spring. Let them bloom!
• Then, especially in our climate and terrain, the many varieties of deciduous trees come into bloom, along with the brambles, providing nutritious forage all summer long.
• Goldenrod, Asters, & Knotweed are extremely valuable sources of nectar and pollen in the fall.
• If weather and forage and colony population all align in a perfect storm of cooperation, a family of bees in our very brief forage season can modestly store enough honey to get through the winter plus some for the beekeeper.
• A sustainable bee farm leaves 60 to 100 lbs of honey for a colony of bees and still might lose 10% to 50% or more of their colonies depending on beekeeper experience, winter conditions, nutritional value of bee forage, disease, rainfall, chemical contaminants from garden and agricultural practices, predators, and many more human and environmental challenges.

How many hives is too many? To be sustainable up here a beekeeper will monitor and adjust the number of hives the bee farm can feed consistently over many seasons and over many years that exhibit varying climate conditions. The bee farm will also need to maintain a responsible replacement plan for colonies that fail, ideally by splitting those that survive.

 
Yes, it is hard work…for the bees and for the beekeeper, but the northeast has served them both well for hundreds of years as a refuge from the land limitations of more urban settings, as well as the industrial agriculture challenges of southern states. And the honey, in my humble opinion, is some of the best and purest in the world.

Athena Contus ~ Athena’s Bees
Carroll County Adult Education
Cornell University Certified Master Beekeeper
University of Montana Certified Master Beekeeper

Pesticide Lethal Dose Considerations

Pesticide Herbicide Fungicide: "cide" on a word means "an agent that destroys or inhibits growth"

In my university studies about bees, we are encouraged to share the following information gleaned from current research as of 2024 from the EPA website and the National Pesticide Information Center. I am not an expert, but it does not hurt to motivate thoughtful landowners to do some further study when choosing to use pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.

Let's bee better informed when a pest control company says their chemicals are safe. Ask them "safe for what?" In the U.S. we primarily rely on labels to explain appropriate use by applicators rather than ban lethal products, so the fact that you can buy it over the counter or hire someone to use it does not mean it is “safe”. EPA approved does not mean “safe”. Ask specifically what chemical they are using and what LD50 the dosage is based on. Make sure they know your concerns as this may influence their application routine.

LD50 means "Lethal Dose" or "how much of this stuff will kill 50 percent of an animal species either on contact (acute), after a few days (chronic) as a coating on plants (residual), as a consequence, for example, of bees bringing contaminated pollen back to feed their young and affect their ability to function, (sublethal), or if it interacts with other chemicals or substances (synergistic). The figure is usually based on weight. LD50 for mice is not the same for bees. The LD50 for mosquitos or ticks vary from bees.

In addition, the concentration of a particular chemical that kills 50% of a species in the same time-period is known as the Lethal Concentration (or the LC50). The higher the LD50 or LC50 the more it takes to kill. The less LD50 or LC50 the less chemical it takes to kill. The LC50 for mice will obviously be different for bees.

If you are concerned about your bees or native pollinators, or other pets or livestock, look up the LD50 and LC50 for the chemical in use for the specific animal you need to protect and the application precautions. Don't rely completely on the applicator hired to do it, but if they know your concerns they should make recommendations. Oddly, most info out there does not understand that bees bite and collect plant materials other than pollen and nectar and need water to survive, so the residual numbers are important for bees and other pollinators.

Neem oil: The active ingredient in neem oil, azadirachtin, disrupts the endocrine system of insects and prevents them from reproducing or feeding. Neem oil also affects the nervous system of honeybees, causing paralysis and death. I've seen this happen to a honey bee colony placed with confidence by a beekeeper on an organic farm and it is heartbreaking.

Here are some EPA approved insecticides used for Mosquito control with some indicators of their toxicity:

Organophosphates

Malathion - is highly toxic to bees, whether from direct contact, contact with foliar residues, or contact with residues on pollen. The honey bee topical LD50 is 0.71 μg/bee. Malathion is toxic to other beneficial insect species, and very highly toxic to aquatic invertebrates. The LC50 for worms is 613 mg/kg of soil.

Naled - moderately to highly toxic when eaten by birds such as mallards, Canada geese, and sharp-tailed grouse. Mallards also showed a reduction in egg production, egg survival, and hatchling survival following long-term repeated exposures to naled. Naled is also highly toxic to bees through direct contact (LD50 of 0.48 micrograms/bee). Indirect contact with plants was found to be highly toxic one hour after application and practically non-toxic one day after application. During a field application, naled was low to moderate in toxicity to honeybees after three hours.

Synthetic Pyrethroids
At high doses, twitching, paralysis, and death are observed...kill a wide variety of insects instead of selectively targeting specific pest species. For this reason, many are highly toxic to honey bees and other beneficial insects. Low doses can impair development, reduce foraging behavior, and hinder foragers’ ability to find their way home, and have all been shown to impair motor functioning in bees in various studies.

Conclusion
There is a lot more information on how the inert ingredients vs active ingredients of a pesticide, herbicide, or fungicide impact our natural world. Look to reputable, peer reviewed research projects for answers. With honey bees, for instance, even the inert ingredients that help do things like thin a chemical to help it move through a sprayer, not required to be on the label, can be lethal.

Athena Contus ~ Athena’s Bees
Carroll County Adult Education
Cornell University Certified Master Beekeeper
University of Montana Certified Master Beekeeper