by BioMed Central

Managed honey bees. Credit: Bianca Ackermann, public domain

Urban honey bees could be used to gain insight into the microbiome of the cities in which they forage, which can potentially provide information on both hive and human health, reports a study published in Environmental Microbiome.

Cities are built for human habitation, but are also spaces that host a wide range of living species, and understanding this diverse landscape is important for urban planning and human health. However, sampling the microbial landscape in a manner to cover wide areas of a city can be labor-intensive.

Elizabeth Hénaff and colleagues investigated the potential of honey bees (Apis mellifera) to help gather samples of microorganisms across cities, as honey bees are known to forage daily up to one mile from their hives in urban environments. They sampled various materials from three hives in New York as part of a pilot study, and found diverse genetic information, including from environmental bacteria, in the debris accumulated at the bottom of the hives. Subsequent samples of hive debris in Sydney and Melbourne (Australia), Venice (Italy), and Tokyo (Japan) suggest that each location has a unique genetic signature as seen by honey bees.

In Venice, the genetic data was dominated by fungi related to wood rot and date palm DNA. In Melbourne, the sample was dominated by eucalyptus DNA, while the sample from Sydney showed little plant DNA but contained genetic data from a bacteria species that degrades rubber (Gordonia polyisoprenivorans). Tokyo samples included plant DNA from Lotus and wild soybean, as well as the soy sauce fermenting yeast Zygosaccharomyces rouxii. Additionally, the authors compiled genetic material from the hive debris for Rickettsia felis (“cat scratch fever”), a pathogen that is spread to humans via cat scratches. These findings indicate the potential of this as a surveillance method but are currently too preliminary to suggest that this is an effective method of monitoring human diseases.

The hive debris also contained bee-related microorganisms, likely coming from honey bee parts present in the debris. Based on 33 samples from the hives across the subsequent four cities, the authors found known bee microorganisms, whose presence indicate a healthy hive, and in some hives bee pathogens were detected, such as Paenibacillus larvae , Melissococcus plutonius, or the parasite Varroa destructor. The authors suggest these findings indicate that debris may additionally be used to assess the overall health of the hives.

The authors conclude that honey bee hive debris collected by honey bees provides a snapshot of the microbial landscape of urban environments and could be used alongside other measures to assess the microbial diversity and health of cities and honey bees in turn.

More information: Elizabeth Hénaff, Holobiont Urbanism: sampling urban beehives reveals cities’ metagenomes, Environmental Microbiome (2023). DOI: 10.1186/s40793-023-00467-z. www.biomedcentral.com/articles … 6/s40793-023-00467-z

Provided by BioMed Central

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: https://www.labmanager.com/ebooks/assays-reagents-and-antibodies-29356

BY STEVE WALENTIK

Associate Professor Aimee Dunlap has been working with researchers from six institutions around the St. Louis region to study pollination in urban orchards. The three-year project is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. (Screenshot)

Aimee Dunlap, an associate professor of biology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has been directing a project studying pollination in urban and suburban orchards with colleagues at six institutions across the St. Louis region since last fall.

STLMade, an initiative of Greater St. Louis Inc. spotlighting notable and innovative work being done in the region, featured the collaboration in a feature story and video headlined “Hive Mind” on its website last week. It was the first installment of a two-part series about the project.

The research dives into the role of bees in pollination with the goal of maximizing fruit production while supporting biodiversity, and it’s supported by a $633,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

“I think that sometimes, when we think of animal behavior and we think about nature, we think about nature that’s far off,” Dunlap told STLMade. “It’s in Glacier National Park. It’s whales in the ocean. But right in your backyard is so much drama of what’s going on, just among the insects. A lot of times when we’re in our yards or we’re at a picnic, we see bees around. Those bees have fascinating lives. And we have so many different kinds of bees that all have different natural histories, like how they handle the winter, how they find mates, how they’re finding food, how they’re nesting. There’s such diversity here – when you dig into that, it is absolutely fabulous.”

Dunlap specializes in urban ecology and bee behavior, and she is a master gardener who volunteers with the 13th Street Community Garden in her Old North St. Louis neighborhood.

“Urban orchards are growing, and in St. Louis, we’re up to over 50 of them thanks to Seed St. Louis and Dean Gunderson,” Dunlap said in the video, referring to Seed St. Louis’ director of education. “But one aspect of those urban orchards – because they tend to be so small – is that the fruit production is great some years and poor other years. We’re really looking at ways of making that better – how are we going to maximize this fruit production?”

They aren’t just focusing on the pollinators but also on the plants as they study the role pollination plays in supporting a thriving ecosystem.

“We have experts and people that are tending to each single step of the entire pollination process, all the way from the emergence of a flower bud to the moment that you pick that apple or that fruit from the tree,” said Gerardo Camilo, a professor of biology at Saint Louis University who has done extensive research on the communities of bee pollinators present in St. Louis.

In addition to Dunlap and Camilo, the team of researchers includes UMSL Associate Professor Nathan Muchhala; Ed Spevak, curator of invertebrates at the Saint Louis Zoo and director of the Saint Louis Zoo WildCare Institute Center for Native Pollinator Conservation; Nicole Miller-Struttmann, the Laurance L. Browning Jr. Endowed Associate Professor of Biology at Webster University; Kyra Krakos, the coordinator of sustainability & environmental stewardship and associate professor of biology at Maryville University; and Peter Hoch, curator emeritus at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: STLMade spotlights UMSL-led research on pollination in urban orchards – UMSL Daily | UMSL Daily

David Moin

ShopCore Properties is creating a lot of buzz.

The real estate company is installing beehives in 30 of its 50-plus shopping centers around the country, in recognition of Earth Day and furthering its sustainability initiatives. Beekeepers are being hired.

Last year, the privately held ShopCore piloted an urban beekeeping program installed at two properties in 2021.

“Sustainability is central to our mission, our mandate and our purpose,” Corinne Rico, director of sustainability for ShopCore Properties, said in a statement Monday. “From our properties to our communities, prioritizing the environment is part of how we do business. Installing beehives is one more layer to our sustainability and environmental goals. Bees play an exceedingly important role in a thriving ecosystem and the honey they produce is rich in antioxidants. So bees are advantageous for not only the environment but also your health.”

ShopCore will install the beehives during 2022 and will harvest the honey in the fall. The honey will then be packaged and offered to communities as gifts. Each beehive will have about 50,000 bees and will be cared for by local beekeepers, the company indicated. ShopCore has partnered with Alvéole, an urban beekeeping company.

A majority of the beehives will be located on the top of the building’s roofs, with a few on green spaces on the property, including in the back of parking lots.

Rico said each ShopCore property will have its own set of solutions to advance sustainability and that overall, the company looks to partner with tenants to achieve sustainability goals.

ShopCore said its sustainability solutions include benchmarking and tracking energy consumption; green leasing practices; reducing energy, water, and waste; installing renewable energy systems; incorporating sustainability into all business decisions, and installing electric vehicle charging stations across its parking areas.

ShopCore, an affiliate of The Blackstone Group, manages 50-plus community, power and grocery-anchored centers, almost all in open-air formats, covering about 20 million square feet across 19 states. Retail tenants include Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, Ross Stores and Home Goods, among others. Key properties include One Colorado in Pasadena, Calif.; Downtown Palm Beach Gardens in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and The Shops At SkyView Center, an enclosed center in Flushing, N.Y.

An Alternative Use for Shopping Centers: Beehives (yahoo.com)

Everyone got so into the idea of urban beekeeping that now there might be too many urban bees

What happens when every company decides that the sustainable thing is to put a beehive on the MORE LIKE THIS

BY ADELE PETERS

Urban beekeeping is big business: Alvéole, one company based in Montreal, manages thousands of beehives on the rooftops of more than 600 office buildings in North America, at corporations that host bees (and offer free honey) as an employee perk. You can pay other companies to take care of a beehive in your backyard.

The number of hives in cities keeps growing. In Paris, for example, the number of registered hives has jumped up by a factor of eight over the last decade. It’s billed as good for nature. But a recent study that looked at the growth of beekeeping in Swiss cities finds that the number of bees is now unsustainable: When the bees fly out to find pollen, there aren’t enough urban flowers to support them. And the honeybees may be putting pressure on other pollinators.

In Switzerland, the researchers saw the same trend that’s happening elsewhere, with strong growth in beekeeping in almost every city between 2012 and 2018 (in the Swiss city of Lugano, which they studied, the number of hives grew 2,387%). Then they looked at the green space available around clusters of hives. In each city, there weren’t enough “floral resources” for the huge number of new bees.

The study doesn’t analyze how the surplus of bees might be impacting other wildlife, but it does note that honeybees can negatively impact the number of wild pollinators in an area. In a place like the U.S., where European honeybees were imported for agriculture, they compete with wild bees and butterflies, which are already at risk for other reasons, from pesticide use to climate change.

Adding more green space and pollinator-friendly plants in cities would help. But the study suggests that cities also need to set limits on the proliferation of urban honeybees, with the number of hives allowed in any particular area limited by the amount of green space nearby and enough distance between hives. And companies that are adding bees to make their image greener—something that some critics have called “bee-washing”—might want to rethink their plans.

Everyone got so into the idea of urban beekeeping that now there might be too many urban bees (fastcompany.com)

Cover Crops Benefit Both Commercial Farmers and Urban Gardeners

NRCS National Plant Materials Center (PMC) staff David Kidwell-Slak (PMC Manager), Shawn Belt (Horticulturist), and Dan Dusty (Farm Manager).

By Nancy McNiff, Strategic Communications Coordinator, Farm Production and Conservation Business Center

Increasingly, farmers and even urban and backyard gardeners are realizing that cover crops are critical to their operations and gardens. Cover crops – plants grown primarily to benefit the successful growth of other future crops – help with soil erosion, improve soil health, crowd out weeds, control pests and diseases, increase biodiversity, and can bring a host of other benefits to your farm or garden, including increased profitability.

Cover crops can be planted any time of the year, but typically after your main crops have been harvested, usually in the fall, and they are grown until you plant your next crop in the spring.

In late 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Materials Center planted cover crops at the Department’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C. – an urban garden just a short walk from the Washington Monument.

David Kidwell-Slak, NRCS National Plant Materials Center Manager, and his team planted cereal rye, a cover crop that’s cold-weather hardy, that will help improve the soil and suppress winter weeds that may emerge.

First, they start with one of the raised beds, temporarily removing the drip irrigation system – a “game-changer” for the home or urban gardener or farmer, says Kidwell-Slak, because it provides water to a bed whenever it’s needed, making crops more productive.

Then comes preparing the bed by raking, removing, and saving the now-brown, bald cypress tree leaves they’ve used to keep the soil covered through the summer and fall. They spread the cereal rye seeds over the soil by hand and lightly rake them in to make sure there is good seed-to-soil contact.

Next, comes lightly tamping down the soil with the side of the rake to make sure the soil stays put and adding back the dry bald cypress leaves to cover all the bare soil. Lastly, the drip irrigation system is returned.

Cover Crops Protect Against Climate Changes and Improve Water Quality

Besides the many other benefits, cover crops remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help make your soil more resilient to a changing climate. They lead to better water infiltration and water holding capacity in the soil and make the soil less susceptible to erosion from wind and water. In addition, cover crops trap excess nitrogen – keeping it from leaching into groundwater or running off into surface water – releasing it later to feed growing crops. This is a win-win, saving you money on inputs like water and fertilizer and making crops better able to survive in harsh conditions.

“So, if you do cover crops year-after-year, you see improvements in soil health, which ultimately lead to more resilient soils, better crop yields, and more conservation of resources,” said Kidwell-Slak.

More Information

NRCS provides technical and financial assistance to help farmers plant cover crops through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. NRCS also launched a new Cover Crop Initiative on January 10, which provided additional support for cover crops in 11 states.

Meanwhile, USDA has made other strides to support cover crops through Federal crop insurance. In 2021, USDA provided a premium benefit to help producers with crop insurance maintain cover crops amid the pandemic as well as enacted other flexibilities.

To learn more, visit farmers.gov/conserve/soil-health or contact your local USDA Service Center.

Nancy McNiff is a USDA Strategic Communications Coordinator.

Cover Crops Benefit Both Commercial Farmers and Urban Gardeners | Farmers.gov

City trees are turning green early, prompting warnings for food and pollination

MICHAEL LEVITT

Premature greening in urban trees could have negative environmental and economic impacts, a new study has found.

Cindy Ord/Getty Images

If you live in a big city, you might see trees start budding even before spring officially arrives.

A new article published in the journal Science found that trees in urban areas have started turning green earlier than their rural counterparts, due to cities being hotter and also having more lights.

“[I] found artificial light in cities acts as an extended daylight and cause earlier spring greening and later autumn leaf coloring,” author Lin Meng said.

Meng is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research collected observations and satellite data from 85 cities in the United States between 2001 and 2014.

“I found trees start to grow leaves and turn green six days earlier in cities, compared to rural areas,” Meng said.

Different types of artificial light in cities like Chicago would minimize harm done to trees, researchers found.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

While the early appearance of spring and longer growing seasons may not seem like a big deal, Meng said there were serious implications for humans, pollinators and wildlife.

For one, early budding plants are at risk of spring frost. And changes in the growing season could also lead to an earlier and more intense pollen season, meaning a higher risk of allergies for humans.

Meng also speculated this could lead to a bigger problem if the trees became out of sync with the insects that pollinate them.

“That may result in food shortage and may just affect insect development, survival and reproduction,” she said.

The changing greening cycles might also have negative economic implications, especially in places that rely on seasonal changes to draw tourism, according to Theresa Crimmins, the director of the USA National Phenology Network.

“Springtime warm temperatures which drive the flowering have become so much more variable,” she said.

“There’s a number of situations where across the country a lot of smaller towns have festivals to celebrate a particular biological phenomenon, like tulip time or a lilac festival.”

Despite the concern, Meng said it wasn’t all bad news.

“If we have a longer growing season, trees would absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” she said.

“They’d have a longer period to do the cooling effect that can help mitigate the urban heating effect in cities.”

In terms of solutions, Meng said selecting different types of artificial light would minimize harm done to trees and that if light pollution was removed, early tree greening could be reversed.

City trees are turning green early, prompting warnings for food and pollination : NPR

VICTORIA – More bees are coming to Victoria.

Canadian urban beekeeping company Alveole is putting approximately 50,000 new bees per hive into 12 new North American cities, four of which are in Canada including Victoria, as well as 5 in Europe.

Founded in 2013, Alveole, a social enterprise focused on environmental education, currently manages nearly 3,400 beehives, mostly installed on roofs or grounds of almost 600 companies, schools and organizations within North America and Europe.

The arrival of the hives has been eagerly  awaited by companies wanting to join the movement towards the development of greater biodiversity in urban areas through installing beehives on their roofs or grounds. North America has lost over 50 per cent of its honey bee colonies over the past decade.

Alveole President and Co-Founder Alex McLean states “Bees pollinate up to 70 per cent of our food  crops. Beyond promoting urban biodiversity, beekeeping serves primarily to create awareness in  urban populations, connecting people to the role pollinators play in our ecosystem and the health of the nature that surrounds us.”

This past August, real estate giant Goldman Sachs Asset Management inaugurated its first 30 sites or apiaries on the roofs of buildings they manage in the U.S. The company sees this as a concrete gesture to protect and preserve a threatened species like honey bees and represents an important step forward in scaling up environmental conservation.

Bee Hives Coming To Victoria | Business Examiner

Premieres Wednesday, October 20 at 8/7c on PBS (check local listings), pbs.org/nature and the PBS Video app.

Taking refuge from the coronavirus pandemic, wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn set out to record all the bees he could find in his tiny urban garden in Bristol, England, filming them with one-of-a kind lenses he forged on his kitchen table. Eventually, he gets so close to the bees, he can identify individuals just by looking at them.

The age of extinction

‘Honeybees are voracious’: is it time to put the brakes on the boom in beekeeping?

The number of beehives in Britain’s cities is growing rapidly, putting pressure on native bees ‘that really need our help’, say scientists and experienced beekeepers

by Alexander Turner

“Dinosaurs, robots and honeybees. I don’t know why, but everyone is fascinated,” says Richard Glassborow, chair of the London Beekeepers’ Association (LBKA). When it comes to beekeeping, what was once a niche hobby has flourished, especially in Britain’s cities.

But there is growing concern from scientists and experienced beekeepers that the vast numbers of honeybees, combined with a lack of pollinator-friendly spaces, could be jeopardising the health and even survival of some of about 6,000 wild pollinators across the UK. Last year, Kew Gardens’ State of the World’s Plant and Fungi report warned: “Campaigns encouraging people to save bees have resulted in an unsustainable proliferation in urban beekeeping. This approach only saves one species of bee, the honeybee, with no regard for how honeybees interact with other, native species.”

There are around 270 species of solitary bee and 25 species of bumblebee that really need our help

Prof Jane Memmott, Bristol University

“The general public know about honey; they know it comes from a bee. I think for most people, that’s it. That’s bees,” says Prof Jane Memmott at Bristol University. “Actually, there is the huge swathe of native biodiversity – around 270 species of solitary bee and 25 species of bumblebee – that really need our help.”

Alarmed at the number of beehives in London more than doubling over a 10-year period, with an estimated 7,400 hives in Greater London, the LBKA said earlier this year: “The prevailing ‘save the bees’ narrative is often based on poor, misleading or absent information about bees and their needs. It can imply that keeping honeybees will help bees, which is not necessarily the case.”

Dale Gibson of Bermondsey Street Bees surveys bees kept at a brownfield site in London Docklands. Photograph: Alexander Turner

Glassborow adds: “We have to change the narrative. People think getting honeybees is going to save bees. It isn’t. This is quite a sensitive issue for a beekeeping association to take on … [but] this is coming from the membership, it’s not something that a few people are campaigning for.”

“Honeybees are not in decline; they are probably the most numerous bee on the planet,” says Andrew Whitehouse from insect conservation charity Buglife. While the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization reports there are more than 90m honeybee hives globally, many rarer native pollinators are in increasingly precarious positions.

“Our wild pollinators are in serious trouble. Across the board we are seeing a loss of the abundance and the diversity of pollinating insects,” adds Whitehouse. “We are seeing threatened species becoming more threatened and more rare. We are seeing some species that we know are really on the brink of extinction in the UK.

To read the complete article go to: ‘Honeybees are voracious’: is it time to put the brakes on the boom in beekeeping? | Bees | The Guardian

By: Carey Smith

Urban beekeeping is a growing trend. It may seem odd to many to keep bees in an urban area, but bees in cities are actually more likely than rural bees to survive the winter as well as Colony Collapse Disorder (the main culprit of bee decline). This is due to the more varied diet and better immune systems of city bees. Within Springfield city limits, urban beekeepers are limited to five hives. No broad expanse of countryside is needed, as flowering trees, bushes and plants in urban yards provide a diverse selection of nectar and pollen for bees to forage.

Brothers Seve and Gage recently got their own hives to care for and harvest.  –  Photo by: Jennifer Aholt

Surprisingly, it is not uncommon for children to keep beehives. Seve Gedaminski, age 8, and his brother Gage, 10, both of Springfield, began their beekeeping endeavors with a family friend, who has been a beekeeper for 10 years. Although Seve has been stung a few times through his beekeeping suit, his brother Gage says it’s not a common occurrence. “They’re not dangerous unless you’re messing with them. They warn you if you are bothering them.” The brothers each have a hive of their own, located in Petersburg.

Lincoln Land Beekeepers Association (LLBKA) president Jeremy Margaron’s interest in bees started as a home school science project with his children, beginning with a couple of hives. His family now tends about 100 hives in rural Mechanicsburg, selling honey and supplies, with a physical store put on hiatus due to the pandemic. Margaron says, “I figured the best way to teach my children how to run a business was to run a business.”

A 15-foot x 15-foot space with a water source is required, as well as a hive setup, including frames, and a package of bees with a queen. Beekeeping clothing and tools are recommended for a beginner. Margaron advises a budding urban beekeeper to first join a local beekeeping club and to get a mentor. “That’s the best way to success,” he states.

Though it’s a little late to get started this year on keeping bees, it’s still possible. Classes are often available through the University of Illinois Extension Office, and LLBKA hopes to have online classes available soon.

There are many benefits of urban beekeeping, one of which is that urban bees pollinate the bulk of home gardens.

One of every three bites of food we eat is pollinated by bees. Without bees, much of our regular and familiar foods would disappear. Beekeeping can also be a great stress reducer. Margaron says that when he is tending his bees, his focus is so great that all concerns of the day melt away.

If you are like many people, wishing to support bees and beekeepers but not able or willing to tend bees personally, there are many ways to help. One is to eliminate the use of pesticides in the urban lawn. Though many are aghast at the sight of dandelions, they are a wonderful early source of nectar and pollen for bees. Anything in a yard that flowers will feed bees, and having an abundant source of nectar and pollen for bees exiting winter and entering spring is of great benefit to them. It is also helpful to plant flowers that bloom throughout the season, especially early and late. Even weeds like asters can provide an abundance of nectar and pollen for bees and other pollinators as they head into winter.

Another way to support local beekeepers is to buy their honey. China is one of the biggest honey producers in the world. But like olive oil, even if the label states it is 100% pure, it often is not. Honey from China tends to be ultra-filtered, is often adulterated with rice syrup or corn syrup, and even worse, can contain harmful antibiotics. Yes, “honey laundering” is real, and can be avoided. Buying local is always a good practice in ensuring the quality of the products you buy, especially when you know your beekeeper well.

While keeping bees is not a quick return on investment, it does provide sweet rewards for those who are patient.

Brothers Seve and Gage say their favorite reward is bread and honey sandwiches.

Carey Smith is a gardener who is currently replacing her front lawn with flowering plants in support of bees.
https://www.illinoistimes.com/springfield/the-buzz-on-urban-bees/Content?oid=12108619

________________________________________________________________________________

By: Paula Froelich

Firefighters respond to a swam of bees in Pasadena. Pasadena Fire Department

California first responders were all abuzz when they showed up to a report of a bee sting — only to be attacked by 40,000 aggressive African killer honeybees.

The first firefighter on the scene in Pasadena was stung 17 times — six other firefighters and police were stung afterward. Three first responders were rushed to a nearby hospital while others rushed to shut down the block.

“I’ve been with the fire department 18 years now and responded to several bee incidents,” Pasadena Fire Department Public Information Officer Lisa Derderian told CNN. “But never to this magnitude. … The bees were very aggressive.”

The hive, located on the roof of a Hampton Inn, was eventually removed and the bees left.

The African Killer bees, which were introduced to Southern California in 1994, have caused havoc throughout the years — in 2018 a woman was stung over 200 times by the killer bees after reaching for a mop in her car.

https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/swarm-of-40000-killer-bees-attack-first-responders-in-california/

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Posted by: Dyana Bagby

A Perimeter Center office complex is the latest home to honeybee hives as part of a regional effort to rebuild a healthy honeybee population. The new bee hives are also contributing to the city of Dunwoody’s Bee City recent designation as a “Bee City” and its mission to support sustainable habitats for bees and other pollinators.

The new honey bee hives at the Crowne Pointe office campus in Perimeter Center. (Special)

The three honey bee hives were recently installed by Madison Marquette, a Perimeter Center real estate company, at the Crowne Pointe office campus at 1040 and 1050 Crowne Point Parkway. Crowne Pointe is a two-building campus off Perimeter Center West owned by Pacific Oak Capital.

“It is great to see a local business so supportive of our efforts to maintain a healthy pollinator population,” said Dunwoody Nature Center Executive Director Michael Cowan in a press release.

The installations were done by Bee Downtown, a group dedicated to installing honey bee hives on corporate campuses throughout the southeast to help rebuild healthy honeybee populations. In Georgia, Bee Downtown has installed bee hives at office campuses including Cox Enterprises in Sandy Springs, Delta Air Lines, Georgia Power and Ponce City Market.

The Bee Downtown Atlanta corridor is comprised of nearly 40 miles of healthy hives spanning south from Fayetteville to the newest site and most northern site at Crown Pointe, according to the release.

The bees at each location forage in a radius of up to three miles on average and impacting more than 18,000 acres, according to Bee Downtown.

“As more and more companies join the Bee Downtown initiative, the three-mile radius the bees from each hive fly begin to overlap, creating a connected corridor throughout the city,” the release said. “Since the hives are all maintained through the same expert management process, they act as a valuable control group for assessing environmental health in the cities where they are found.”

The honey bee hives with one of the Crowne Pointe office towers in the background. (Special)

The bees at Crowne Pointe are close enough to interact with the honey bee hives at the Dunwoody Nature Center, about 2.5 miles north of the Perimeter Center office campus.

“I was very happy to welcome the new hives at Crown Pointe to the growing network of hives in Dunwoody and even happier to learn that they are close enough to interact with the bees at the Dunwoody Nature Center,” Cowan said in the release.

“While I know all office and corporate campuses don’t have the room to host bee hives, we hope they will all consider planting native pollinator-friendly plants and refrain from using harmful pesticides that end up killing so many helpful pollinators,” he said.

Madison Marquette recently celebrated the installation of the bee hives with an event that included a ribbon cutting.

“We are extremely excited to initiate our partnership with Bee Downtown as part of our ongoing commitment to sustainability,” said Madison Marquette’s Julie Motsinger, executive vice president of Strategic Accounts.

“Pacific Oak’s investment in the Crown Pointe beehives as an amenity program offers tenants a point of engagement focused on environmental stewardship,” Motsinger said.

Pollinators such as honey bees, butterflies, beetles and flies are crucial to the reproductive success of more than 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants, fruits, nuts and berries, according to the Dunwoody Nature Center. 

U.S. honey bee populations are declining at an annual rate of 44 percent and more, according to the Nature Center. Dunwoody is one of more than 80 cities designated as a Bee City

Written by Robert Smith

If the “shrinking city” phenomenon in Detroit is good for one thing, it’s bees.

While closet beekeeping operations have been a staple of Detroit’s urban agriculture since the 1930s, backyard beekeeping is experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

The city’s beekeepers credit urban farming efforts, the city’s large swaths of open land and nationwide concern about the wide-ranging impact of declining bee populations.

“Detroit is almost like living in the country,” veteran beekeeper Rich Wieske, 65, said. “There’s 140 square miles, and a third of it is open, vacant land. What grows in vacant land? ‘Weeds,’ or flowers. It’s a great nectar source. And who sprays? It’s fabulous.”

A University of Michigan published in May looked at bee populations in urban areas and found conclusions similar to Wieske’s observations.

The data showed that in urban areas where female bees have fewer opportunities to forage within a five-mile radius of the hive, population and diversity declined. These findings line up with the more commonly known negative relationship between industrial farming practices and bee populations.

Surprisingly, however, the number of bees in Detroit does not reflect this nationwide decline. The study concluded that vacant lots, with flowering weeds that go untreated by pesticides, support bee diversity just as well as nearby green spaces.

For the scientists involved, Detroit even represents a paradigm for how urban landscapes can be managed to support native bee conservation.

According to Wieske, beehive numbers today are near levels in the 1930s, when the city had 2,000 registered hives — and, he said, many more unregistered ones. And while Detroit has always been a fertile area for hives and beekeeping, only within the last 20 years has public perception of the hobby changed.

“There’s been a 180 (degree) attitude (shift) in the public about bees,” he said. “When we started 20 years ago, you’d start talking about bees, people would fold their arms and back up. They see a very strange dude with strange insects. But everybody has an opinion now.”

The surging popularity is a boon for the self-proclaimed bee activist, who is involved in the Southeastern Michigan Beekeepers Association. He teaches beekeeping classes to more than 30 people every spring through Green Toe Gardens and sells his products at Eastern Market on Saturdays.

Keep Growing Detroit, another local urban farming company, also offers beekeeping classes. Its program, called Sweet on Detroit Bee-Ginner Beekeeping Program, pairs novice bee enthusiasts with seasoned beekeepers and provides 20 hours of training.

Detroiters Nicole Lindsey and Timothy Paule took the class this spring. Lindsey said Paule’s winter cold was cured by raw local honey, inspiring them to keep bees for homeopathic and environmental reasons.

“I thought that it would be new and different in the city of Detroit,” Paule said. “We want to educate people about bees and spread the knowledge of medicinal properties of honey, and to preserve the bee population, all while removing blight.”

By May, the duo acquired a vacant lot near E. Warren and McClellan on the city’s east side. The site has three hives and two garden plots with peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, squash and basil, lavender bushes and lemon trees, planted by Peace Tree Parks.

At first, Paule said, the neighbors were confused about their operations and on alert for signs of dumping. But once the couple explained what they were doing, the mood changed.

“It used to be an eyesore,” Lindsey said. “The neighbors love it.”

Ann Franks, 74, lives behind the lot on Cooper.

She said overgrown weeds covered the property, and the city only mowed three times last summer, but now it looks nice.

“It’s a good thing,” she said. “I’ve seen the butterflies, I hadn’t seen them in a while, so that’s good.”

Franks said she learned from Paule that as long as she didn’t bother the bees, they wouldn’t bother her.

But the best part will be the honey. “They’re going to let me taste it,” Franks said with delight.

Lindsey and Paule said they hope to keep repurposing vacant land for beekeeping and hosting events with their bees.

They have already educated students at Southeastern High School about beekeeping with a three-hour class and plan to conduct a “yoga with the bees” event.

While great for Detroit’s plentiful urban farms and gardens, the new buzz poses interesting questions for municipal governments.

Wrifton Graham, master beekeeper and owner of Great Lakes Bee Supply in Kalamazoo, said he and his company educate bee enthusiasts and veterinarians about best practices and travel to local municipalities to discuss bee ordinances and encourage an addendum for bees.

Beekeeping exists in a gray area, he said. While a minor species, they are considered large animals because they are a livestock from which humans derive goods. The comparison isn’t exactly right, he said, because a beehive has neither the same operations nor the same impact as a large animal farm.

Detroit does not have a citywide beekeeping regulation, said Kathryn Lynch Underwood, a planner with the city planning commission.

She said her goal is to make beekeeping explicitly legal.

Underwood said she’s developing an ordinance that would allow beekeeping outside schools, on farms and in backyards — so long as the land isn’t explicitly purchased to keep bees and keepers follow generally accepted industry standards.

Under her proposed regulations, gardens of up to one acre could have six hives, while larger sites could have up to eight hives. Backyards, restaurants and schools could have two hives. Hives would have to be at least 10 feet from streets, sidewalks and other public right of way.

If within 25 feet of property lines, the hive’s opening would have to face away from doors, windows and neighboring residential properties. If within five feet, a flyaway barrier would be required so honey bees fly upward and away from neighboring properties.

Under Underwood’s proposal, a beekeeping license from the Animal Care and Control Division of the Detroit Health Department would be required.

One challenge, Underwood said, is educating people about the distinction between yellow jackets and wasps, the aggressive stingers that bug picnickers, and honeybees, passive honey-producing pollinators.

So far, unless neighbors complain, authorities take no action against urban beekeepers, Underwood said.

jkroeker

Tags: bee hives × beekeping × blight × Detroit × Detroit bees × honey × ordinances × Southeastern Michigan Beekeepers Association × urban farms

Toni Burnham

By Toni Burnham

The Golden Years Are Gone.

The most experienced beekeepers I know tell me of golden years some three decades ago, before Varroa made its landfall in Florida in the 1980s. My friend Ken once said, “It was almost as if you could just throw some bees in some boxes behind the barn, then just grab the honey come August.” Then it got harder. A lot harder.

A lot of beeks like Ken threw up their hands in those days–they hadn’t signed up to kill bees, after all–and the numbers of sideliners declined. Urban beekeeping is one of the reasons that the number of beekeepers may be rising again, but it seems that may present some challenges in the city, too.

If I were a new beekeeper facing some of today’s hurdles, I might soon be in the bleachers with Ken. You can actually get to blue skies from here, now, though.

Hitting the Jackpot

There is absolutely no question that I’ve been lucky, both when and where I started (though my bees have taken a bunch of shots along the way). My first bees overlapped mostly with feral colonies, since beekeeping hadn’t become hip yet, and the mites weren’t packing the horrid viral cocktail they are serving now. There were simply no Small Hive Beetles. Only one Nosema. There’s a colony on my roof that has wintered every year since 2005/6, and it has produced glorious healthy bees, honey and the occasional swarm right up until now.

But it’s not because of me. Things I have done wrong: feeding 2:1 at below freezing temperatures, leaving a honey super on the porch in August (“It was just a few minutes!”), storing (unfrozen) brood boxes in a dark basement, procrastinating until October for mite tests and treatments, failing to secure the upper entrance while moving a hive (down a spiral staircase!) . . . oh, the comedy goes on and on. You can learn how to fix a wide range of emergencies when you trigger a lot of them.

Bottom line: my bees survived because the urban world around them was a more forgiving place.

A few years of skill-building before facing the deluge has mattered for the long term. When I took a September mite count for the 2018 Mite-a-Thon, it was 2/100 even with brood in two deeps and a medium, the way they have been running all summer. I’ve split it, twice. Did I mention the 3.5 supers of honey?

When I look at my wonder hive and my haphazard management, I wonder why it has been so difficult, in recent years, to help many of the new beekeepers here to get to this place I call “Cruising Velocity.”

What is this “Cruising Velocity?!”

To me, this means a state of equilibrium where the city bees have become well-adapted to the place they live: adjusting their populations in synch with local seasons and signals, foraging well, splitting every Spring, managing mites and beetles without much help, needing feeding support only occasionally, being polite neighbors.

The cool thing about this Zen state of beeing is that the interventions the bees need are not huge/emergency/high stakes/life-or-death magnitude events.

Big interventions, even when desperately needed, are high risk/high reward, and nature prepares critters for more normal stuff. Nature’s favorite number is “average:” average temperatures, average rainfall, average colony size, average forage availability. Everything has evolved to know what to do with what usually happens. It’s the outlier events that test the odds.

Those super successful bees on my roof have (mostly) got this, and if I maintain a modest glimmer of a clue (the best I can muster some days), I’m there when they need me, and not as a superhero.

But our urban newbees have no reason to believe they will encounter luck like mine. It is luck, too: my major contribution to local beekeeping has been to make every error or succumb to every bad idea. Until the next one.

Why is it harder to get to equilibrium?

This map is based ont the number of reporting locations from 2017’s first-ever survey program, so many areas (especially in the west) may look light on mites when there were really just no participants. But there were LOTS of reports where I live, and the story was sobering.

It’s especially harder for folks here who have started in the past five years to get to Cruising Velocity, I think. Beekeepers are now thick on the rooftops (and the community gardens, and the campuses, and every patch of urban greenspace they can find). We have nearly 500 registered hives in the 68 1/3 square miles of Washington DC today (I could find only a dozen or so in 2005).

This means that newly established urban honey bee colonies will be exposed to every existing threat without exception, just because there will inevitably be a hive within foraging distance which is succumbing already. We also bring in bees constantly to meet growth that outstrips the capacity of our relatively new local nuc producers, and to replace high losses. That’s a potential conveyor belt carrying pests and pathogens from other regions to our doorstep on a regular basis, too.

This is not because someone is awful or at fault: it is the odds.

It works like this: do you know the rule of thumb that only one out of four uncaptured swarms survive to establish a new colony? How would you do this math?

If you have 100 other honey bee colonies within flying distance of your apiary, all have been exposed and some significant number are weak from a Varroa vectored illness. Some are also weak because a queen is in decline and perhaps Small Hive Beetles are finding a way in (I’ve had this happen while a decent colony was just requeening). Some of your neighbor colonies have inevitably robbed a hive that dwindled away due to Nosema; some are competing for dearth-time forage in places so crowded with bees that pests can practically jump from thorax to thorax. Those dearth periods may have effectively gotten a whole lot worse when (no exaggeration) ten times as many colonies are competing for the resources to survive a few critical weeks, so nutrition ain’t great.

“OK, prove it.”

Many of our new beekeepers here tell me, at some point, that none of this could be true for their bees. For example, they have never “seen” a mite on a bee. After I finish slapping my forehead, I like to show them one of the graphics from the Honey Bee Health Coalition:

I

Reporting data gaps in 2017 Mite-A-Thon.

f you have an urban colony with a near-zero level of Varroa mite infestation, your bees will not stay clean forever. According to work by Meghan Milbrath at MSU Extension, if you have even one mother mite in your colony, she is capable of exponential growth that can put you at 12,000-14,000 mites within 10 brood cycles. In your city, there is a mother mite somewhere, with her legs extended on top of a flower in a patch of high-demand dearth-time forage, just waiting for her ride back to your place.

As part of the annual Mite-A-Thon (now in its second year), The Pollinator Partnership has also shared a recap graphic from last year’s survey. Here, you can see that the place where I live is a potential red-hot zone for varroa mite density.

This map is based the number of reporting locations from 2017s first-ever survey program, so many areas (especially in the West) may look light on mites when there were really just no participants. But there were LOTS of reports where I live, and the story was sobering.

The path to blue skies

A Master Beekeeper once told me that the recipe for successful beekeeping is this: a good class, a good mentor, and a good community. Many urbanites like me live around a lot of people but starve for that kind of community.

Well, that will starve your bees, too: join a club, take their course, work with people who have been doing this–in your area–for a while. Even if you are shy. Even if you are the smartest person you ever met. Even if the bees you have purchased were promised to be pure as the driven snow and immortal.

The best start you can get for the bees is a local nuc, too, but you can get to strength even if you start with a shipped-in package. We have been experimenting with Oxalic acid vaporization on incoming packages and supporting just about anyone who is willing to graft queens from overwintered local stock. This is meant to knock down loads, then get a healthy new colony ready to take a readily-available, well-mated local queen.

And requeen that package. Just do it. Pinching your first queen (who may not yet have done anything wrong) seems like a heartlessly cruel thing, counter to your goal of raising rather than killing bees (I still cry inside when I do it). But every single bee in that colony would take one for the team, and they are not averse to making new mommies on their own, either.

Buy one of the increasingly easy to use mite testing kits and learn to use it as soon as you have a couple of frames of capped and some mixed brood. Go ahead and do a small (less than 300 bee) sample if you are worried about losing too many bees too soon. Write down your result. Do it again after another brood cycle (21 days, plus or minus). Use an alcohol wash if you have become as worried as I am, do a sugar shake if you can’t bring yourself to kill the sampled bees (but do it really, REALLY, well). Go to the Honey Bee Health Coalition website (http://honeybeehealthcoalition.org) and grab a copy of their mite threshold matrix to analyze your results. After you have done this a bunch, you get a tremendous eye for what looks right (or wrong) even before you pop the top of a hive.

If you spot your problems early, even if you have not gotten to a truly established colony yet, you can still do easier, less risky interventions.

And ask for help: this is just a lot to learn, and I am still learning shamefully basic things every year. Almost all of us will help you newbees if we can and you are trying hard, too. I’d love to think that there are more of us up on our roofs, drinking morning coffee and watching the first pollen packs of the morning fly in.

What Is the Mite-A-Thon?

In 2017, The Pollinator Partnership, the BeeInformed Partnership, and an impressive number of partner organizations from across the commercial and academic bee worlds launched the Mite-A-Thon, an effort to collect mite infestation data and to visualize Varroa infestations in honey bee colonies across North America within a one-week window each year. The idea is that beekeepers will become more aware about infestations and better able to monitor and address them. Later, the partners will make management strategies available for discussion within bee organizations using information and outreach materials they develop.

It’s easy for individual beekeepers to participate: do a Varroa mite sampling test during the annual sampling period (a week in September), then go to www.mitecheck.com and report your results (mites per hundred and apiary location). You can see graphics displaying survey information as it comes in!

In 2018, the Mite-A-Thon provided recap data for the previous year that compared mite densities among reporting locations, giving beekeepers an idea of infestation levels they might confront in the areas where significant numbers of beekeepers participated in the survey.

Toni Burnham keeps bees and helps new beekeepers get started in the DC area.

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By: Toni Burnham

500,000 Murals Across America

“The Good of the Hive” is a quest by urban artist Matthew Willey to paint 50,000 honey bees in murals across America, and it has already connected North Dakota with New York, Florida with New Hampshire, and the wife of the Vice President, Mrs. Pence, with a third grader in Washington. Where the bees are painted, people come together to learn about and advocate for pollinators (he includes the odd butterfly, too!) and to find connection with each other through concern for the magnificent world of bees and people.

Ten years ago, as a successful muralist, Willey was struck with wonder by an incident that would have caused most beekeepers a bit of worry. While working in his Manhattan studio, he saw that a worker bee had landed, and was resting nearly motionless on his floor.

New to the beauty of bees, Matthew crept down and took a closer look. To his surprise, felt a connection (like so many of us do) and was visited by an inspiration that has since taken him around the United States as an artistic advocate for bees and the ties that bind all of us.

Willey’s bee died, as most beekeepers would have predicted. Instead of shrugging, he got curious about why, and how. Two major lessons struck him deeply. In those days, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was very much on everyone’s mind, a kind of mysterious plague like those that sweep across history. As beekeepers know, CCD was an incredible turning point in peoples’ concern about bees, and willingness to welcome them into their lives (even in odd places, like cities!)

The second surprise was that he learned of the role of “altruistic suicide” in the life of a honey bee. As beekeepers know, the bees do not permit anything dead, dirty, or diseased inside the walls of their hive, and their very life cycle – from house bee to guard to forager – causes the majority of them to die away from home, and without causing a burden or risk to her sisters who maintain the colony.

The name of Matthew’s project, “The Good of the Hive,” came from that lesson. He learned that a honey bee’s immune system is collective: the status of the health and body of any individual bee’s body is not separate from the rest, but her strength is nonetheless a critical contribution to the life of the hive.

It occurred to Willey that, as a human, that was true for him, too. All of the work in “The Good of the Hive” is linked to that idea. In 2015, he got a chance to put that vision into action.

One of Matthew’s friends, knowing of his interest, sent him a video of a large blank wall on a family-owned honey company in LaBelle, Florida, and suggested that he ask whether they might want a mural of honey bees. At this time, as a full-time muralist and with a growing fascination with honey bees and their behaviors, Matthew had not yet painted a honey bee mural.

The first steps were not without complications. The honey company said that they would be delighted to have a mural, but murals were illegal in the town. They also had no money to pay for it. Willey replied that, if they got the law changed, he would come and do the mural anyway.

Several weeks later, to Matthew’s surprise, the town agreed to change the law, and he raised the tiny sum of $500 from friends and went to LaBelle. The project would take 10 weeks and what happened would change the direction of Matthew’s path as an artist forever.

When he got to the town, a family put him up in their RV 10 weeks for free. The coffee shop in town gave him free coffee and breakfast every single day. Restaurants gave him free food and people in the town started donating small amounts here and there. Soon, other honey companies in the U.S. donated to the mural!

In the end, the artwork was fully funded, and Matthew realized that there was a lot more going on than simply raising awareness about the importance of bees. This mural had illuminated issues surrounding honey bees way beyond the world of beekeepers and honey, but in doing so it shined a light on the beauty of the human spirit.

A remarkable conversation on site led continuing the mission. Someone asked Willey, “How many bees are in a healthy honey bee colony, 30,000 to 60,000?” They followed with, “Do you think you could paint 50,000 bees?” (There were only 17 honey bees in the first mural!)

The artist thought about it for a few seconds and replied, “I don’t know. Let’s see!” and “The Good of the Hive” initiative began. It would take nearly eight months to find another mural site, and at least as long to find steady financial support. Matthew ran an online crowdfunding campaign that failed, and struggled with whether it was going to be financially possible to shift the focus of his work as a muralist to his mission for bees and other pollinators.

Photos by Matthew Wiley.

Our community came to the rescue, too. Phyllis Stiles (Bee City USA founder) connected him with members of that great program, and it was a turning point. He was overwhelmed with inquiries about the initiative from all over the country, but North Carolina’s Carrboro and Chapel Hill far exceeded the number of emails received from any other town or city. Since they were based near his part time home in Asheville, they were also close enough to hop in the car and meet them, and to perhaps have simple and economic enough logistics.

After one town council meeting where he shared his story with the Carrboro aldermen, they immediately (and unanimously) agreed to host and fund a mural in their town. Dan Schnitzer of Carrboro saw the education possibilities, and a second mural was planned for an elementary school. With those, the first two murals as a fully formed initiative were in place.

These milestones connected “The Good of the Hive” with Burt’s Bees for their Culture Day in 2016, where he painted a mural at their headquarters.

Here in Washington, DC, another special project took place at the invitation of a second-grade girl. Sanah Hutchins wrote a letter to Willey after seeing a video of his work as part of the garden and honey bee education that is part of the curriculum at Janney Elementary School. When Matthew posted her letter on Instagram, the response was amazing. When Sanah’s mother, Nabeeha Kazi, agreed to lead, the deal was done.

Just a few months later, when the project was done, city council members and Mrs. Karen Pence, wife of the Vice President, were there for the unveiling. The Pences have hosted beehives both at the Governor’s Mansion in Indiana, and now at Observatory House in DC. The bees bring together people across our communities and our country.

And even those who came to the project only at the end were entranced. “What blows me away more than the questions is the curiosity,” Willey told the crowd at the ribbon-cutting. “The idea of making all these paintings, and painting all these bees, is really to spark that curiosity to keep people interested. It’s the essence of why I started doing this in the first place.”

Since the success of its DC project, The Good of the Hive has done spectacular installations at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in New York, and will soon paint a crowdfunded mural in Peterborough, NH. Willey has also painted a beautiful bee on the hearing aid of a little boy who asked for one. He has received inquiries from Maryland and back here in DC, and we cross our fingers that his message of hope and curiosity and bees comes back our way soon.

Even more exciting, The Good of the Hive has been documenting its work and the people it has reached, and it is developing a documentary about the project for which it has produced a trailer. This is an important first step it seeks the same connections and infrastructure the mural projects have found. Stay tuned about where you can see it, and maybe how you can help!

Matthew Willey lives part time in Asheville, NC when he isn’t traveling the world painting murals. Visit thegoodofthehive.com to see more of Matt’s incredible work, or to donate to the project. You can contact Matt directly at matt@thegoodofthehive.com.   

Toni Burnham keeps bees and helps new beekeepers get started in the DC area.