MILLS RIVER — A talk on “Challenges for Today’s Beekeepers” was presented to area beekeepers by internationally known bee expert Jeff Pettis on June 17 at Mountain Horticultural Crops Research and Extension Center. 

The meeting room, with a standing-room-only crowd of 172 people, was sweltering because the air conditioning had been turned off and could only be turned back on remotely.

During the last half of the meeting, the temperature cooled down a bit, after an off-duty MHCR official was contacted and able to turn on the air conditioner from his home.

Following a 45-minute presentation, there was a 20-minute break and then a question-and-answer session.

“We have a full house, so we’ll try to cool it down,” Phyllis Stiles, Asheville’s Bee City USA chief, told the crowd at the opening. She especially thanked the Henderson County Beekeepers Association for its efforts in organizing the program.

Looking over the excited crowd, Stiles said, “Beekeepers don’t need alcohol or marijuana, we get buzzed on bees.”

From asking attendees for a show of hands, Stiles determined that about  one-third to a half were from Henderson County, about a third from Buncombe County and the remainder from Madison County,  Haywood County, Yancey County, McDowell County, Transylvania County and Polk Colk County. Also, a few were from Pickens County, S.C., and one was from Macon County, Ga.

As part of Pollination Celebration Week, Stiles urged the beekeepers to attend a talk by Pettis the following night on “Give Bees a Chance” — geared to the general public — in Asheville

Pettis, research leader at the USDA Beltsville (Md.) Bee Lab, was introduced as someone with a background “in hog production, down in Georgia. So he’s a Southern boy. He got his BS and MS at University of Georgia. and Ph.D. at Texas A&M.”

Greeting the beekeepers, Pettis said, “It is a pleasure to be here. I did come from a pig- farming background, but I got smart and got into bees.... I did grow up in Georgia, but I’m going to use my mid-Atlantic voice.” 

In the first half of his presentation, Pettis gave an overview of activities at the bee lab in Beltsville. In the second, “I’m going to tell about what could be going on with queen health and what’s going on with failing queens.”

He said the Beltsville bee lab “deals with pests and diseases,” while a few other labs around the U.S. handle other bee issues.

“We started out with American foulbrood. Each state tried to combat that. I’d love to go back to the days of only having to deal with foulbrood....

“Jay Evans, research entomologist, and I are the two most senior researchers in the lab. He’s been here (to Western North Carolina) before. He’s probably the most premier person in the lab.”

Pettis noted that “a lot of work being done in Varroa/virus interactions... Another researcher is doing stuff on queen health and nutrition work.... Another guy focuses on how the worker bees respond to chemical exposure.”

He added, “I do a lot of field work with commercial beekeepers ... mite work ... resistance management, which I think is very valuable.

“Sometimes we can tell you (what killed your bees) — with our free diagnostic service — and we can at least tell you some of the things that didn’t kill them. Mail in your dead bees or combs.”

Regarding the question of what should we do about Nosema, Pettis said, “The honest truth is, I just don’t know. The older Nosema was very predictable. The newer” is not.

“We manage about 300 hives” at the lab. “For Varroa control, we use almost exclusively Formic acid. We never treat for Nosema. We never use antiobiotics, generally. We run about 15 apiaries.”

As for colony losses in the U.S., we’ve been averaging about 30 percent colony losses in the winter across the U.S., Pettis said. “Summer loss? It easily reaches over 50 percent.”

About 2.5 million honeybee colonies are managed in the U.S., he said. “For comparison, on the same land mass in Europe, they have 16 million colonies. We used to have 5 million managed colonies (in 1945 the U.S.) .... We need 1.5 million to 1.7 million commercial colonies — alone — to go into almonds. The demand is such for almond pollination that they’re going into the East Coast and pulling bees.”

Pettis noted that, “on a large scale, we don’t have much of a buffer in the U.S... We are trying to make sure we have adequate bees for commercial pollination.” California has, by far, the biggest demand for pollination, so there is a “huge migration (of bee colonies) out to California” each year.

Speaking more generally of the bee die-off problem, Pettis said, “A lot of what I think is going on in bee health in general... is pesticides... There’s an interaction between nutrition and pesticide exposure.”

Successful beekeepers, he said, are doing “two things” to keep their bees alive:

• Foregoing some pollination contracts and taking them out to wild land to get them built up nutritionally.

• Feeding their bees supplemental protein.

Speaking historically, Pettis said, “Humans have had a long association with bees.... I like to imagine the early beekeeper in that tribe... Everyone had a job... We were the simple-minded (individuals) — the ‘different’ group in the clan that were willing to do that (harvest honey while getting stung by bees). The wax and honey were a valuable resource.”

Pettis also spoke at length about “colony performance and failing queens.... Why are queens failing?”

For instance, he said there are “upstream effects: poor mating weather/healthy drones, nutrition during cell building, stock selection/hive disease conditions/pesticide levels in hives/ poor supersedure /transportation.

“We measured live and dead sperm from queens from commercial colonies (failing and healthy)... Drone-laying queens... She mates in the first two weeks of life.... What we found on drone-layers is that they had some dead sperm. You need 3 to 8 million sperm to last a lifetime” for a successful queen, he said.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The is the first of two stories covering Pettis’ talk to local beekeepers. The second one will appear in August’s edition of the Daily Planet.