• Associated Press

Beekeepers from Best Bees inspect two hives on the roof of the Warren Rudman U.S. Court House

CONCORD, N.H. — While judges, lawyers and support staff at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire, keep the American justice system buzzing, thousands of humble honeybees on the building’s roof are playing their part in a more important task — feeding the world.

The Warren Rudman U.S. Court House, in Concord, N.H. The roof of the building hosts two bee hives, a part of a national effort to increase the population of pollinators.

The Warren B. Rudman courthouse is one of several federal facilities around the country participating in the General Services Administration’s Pollinator Initiative, a government program aimed at assessing and promoting the health of bees and other pollinators, which are critical to life on Earth.

“Anybody who eats food, needs bees,” said Noah Wilson-Rich, co-founder, CEO and chief scientific officer of the Boston-based Best Bees company, which contracts with the government to take care of the honeybee hives at the New Hampshire courthouse and at some other federal buildings.

Bees help pollinate the fruits and vegetables that sustain humans, he said. They pollinate hay and alfalfa, which feed cattle that provide the meat we eat. And they promote the health of plants that, through photosynthesis, give us clean air to breathe.

Yet the busy insects that contribute an estimated $25 billion to the U.S. economy annually are under threat from diseases, agricultural chemicals and habitat loss that kill about half of all honeybee hives annually. Without human intervention, including beekeepers creating new hives, the world could experience a bee extinction that would lead to global hunger and economic collapse, Wilson-Rich said.

The pollinator program is part of the federal government’s commitment to promoting sustainability, which includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting climate resilient infrastructure, said David Johnson, the General Services Administration’s sustainability program manager for New England.

The GSA’s program started last year with hives at 11 sites.

Some of those sites are no longer in the program. Hives placed at the National Archives building in Waltham, Massachusetts, last year did not survive the winter.

Since then, other sites were added. Two hives, each home to thousands of bees, were placed on the roof of the Rudman building in March.

The program is collecting data to find out whether the honeybees, which can fly 3 to 5 miles from the roof in their quest for pollen, can help the health of not just the plants on the roof, but also of the flora in the entire area, Johnson said.

“Honeybees are actually very opportunistic,” he said. “They will feed on a lot of different types of plants.”

The program can help identify the plants and landscapes beneficial to pollinators and help the government make more informed decisions about what trees and flowers to plant on building grounds.

Best Bees tests the plant DNA in the honey to get an idea of the plant diversity and health in the area, Wilson-Rich said, and they have found that bees that forage on a more diverse diet seem to have better survival and productivity outcomes.

Other federal facilities with hives include the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services headquarters in Baltimore; the federal courthouse in Hammond, Indiana; the Federal Archives Records Center in Chicago; and the Denver Federal Center.

The federal government isn’t alone in its efforts to save the bees. The hives placed at federal sites are part of a wider network of about 1,000 hives at home gardens, businesses and institutions nationwide that combined can help determine what’s helping the bees, what’s hurting them and why.

The GSA’s Pollinator Initiative is also looking to identify ways to keep the bee population healthy and vibrant and model those lessons at other properties — both government and private sector — said Amber Levofsky, the senior program advisor for the GSA’s Center for Urban Development.

“The goal of this initiative was really aimed at gathering location-based data at facilities to help update directives and policies to help facilities managers to really target pollinator protection and habitat management regionally,” she said.

And there is one other benefit to the government honeybee program that’s already come to fruition: the excess honey that’s produced is donated to area food banks.

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: Honeybee Health Blooming at Federal Facilities Across US (voanews.com)

WRITTEN BY DAVID ANDREWS

| PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID ANDREWS

Volunteers harvest honey at Congressional Cemetery from bees on the cemetery grounds. Photographs and video by David Andrews.

You’ll soon be able to buy honey at, of all places, DC’s Congressional Cemetery—honey that was harvested from apiaries nestled into the hillside among the headstones and above the crypts on the cemetery grounds.

Jan Day is the president of the DC Beekeepers Alliance. She’s been keeping bees in DC for nine years—including apiaries of her own on her second-story balcony in Capitol Hill, appropriately yielding the name of her blog “Second Story Honey.” The alliance has had bees at Congressional for 12 years.

Jan Day, president of the DC Beekeepers Alliance at Congressional Cemetery.

Although it may seem spooky, Day says the cemetery is actually a great place to host bees. “One, it is filled with mature trees, and mature trees bloom and they actually offer a great forage source of nectar and pollen for our bees,” Day says. “Secondly, the cemetery is right along the banks of the Anacostia River, where there’s a variety of plants that are blooming from very early in the spring, even starting in February, through the frost in October, November.”

The hives are stacked behind a fence–away from visitors, which include dogs and dog walkers–and above the crypts built into the hillside, allowing the bees to buzz freely, high above human interference.

Beehives on the grounds of Congressional Cemetery.

Day says the average healthy hive in DC will produce between 30 and 50 pounds of excess honey per year that the beekeeper can take, but they make sure to leave between 60 and 80 pounds of honey on each hive so that bees have sufficient food for the winter.

“Lots of people want to know, ‘How can we help the bees? How can we save the bees?’ Probably the number one thing that you can do is plant pollinator friendly plants in your garden. That will help not just honeybees, but some of the 400 native bees, wasps, pollinators, and butterflies that frequent our gardens here in the city,” Day says.

Another way is to volunteer. The DC beekeepers alliance is made up of about 150 beekeepers across the city and nearby jurisdictions from all walks of life–volunteering as beekeepers for hobby. At Congressional, as many as ten beekeepers are on site at any given time, tending to the 25 hives, each hive containing about 60,000 bees at its peak.

“One of the ways we thank Congressional Cemetery for allowing us to keep bees here is by paying what we call our yard rent. And this is something that beekeepers around the world do. We pay our yard rent in the honey harvest experience that we’re going to have tonight and by donating the honey to the cemetery as their fundraiser.”

Visitors to the cemetery’s honey harvest last Tuesday got to tour the bee yards, try their hands at extracting honey from the hive, and learn how keepers bottle it into jars before sending it out into the community. Day says Beekeepers in DC generally harvest honey once a year, and the cemetery harvests in the fall, when it’s then sold as a fundraiser for the non-profit cemetery.

In total, 150 pounds of honey are bottled into jars for the public to buy.

Cemetery-grown honey, which Day claims is some of the best in the city, will go on sale starting in November, with a six-ounce jar costing $10. The cemetery will announce when sales open on its Facebook and Instagram pages.

“You’ve got to act fast,” Day says. “It goes like hotcakes.”

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.washingtonian.com/2022/10/18/video-honey-soon-for-sale-at-congressional-cemetery/

Industry giants in Colorado host hives as way to support surrounding ecosystems

Free Range Beehives co-founder and head bee keeper John Rosol takes out a frame of bees from a beehive at Sterling Bay West on October 06, 2022. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)

By MEGAN ULU-LANI BOYANTON | mboyanton@denverpost.com | The Denver Post

IBM, Google and other corporations are dedicating budget lines to saving Colorado’s bee population, with hives at their in-state locations, in a business move that supports a critical part of the nation’s food-production system.

The number of honeybee hives in the U.S. has dwindled to around 2.5 million last year from 6 million in the 1940s, the Agriculture Department reported. As the state with the fifth-most bee diversity in the nation, Colorado is home to around 950 bee species, which put in work to pollinate both agricultural crops and native plants.

Without them, systems that humans rely on every day would suffer, including the food supply and ecosystems that provide clean air and stable soil. One solution: Supporting colonies wherever possible — from the average American’s backyard to a corporation’s rooftop.

Industry giants in Colorado have turned to Free Range Beehives, a corporate beekeeping company headquartered in Denver, to help guide their efforts. The business provides on-site beekeeping services to clients large and small, including real estate developer Sterling Bay, manufacturer Gates Corp., Colorado Public Radio, UMB Bank and the University of Denver.

“Our beehive investment in Colorado is part of IBM’s overall commitment to environmental sustainability,” said spokesperson Carrie Bendzsa. “Pollinators play an important role in maintaining a diverse ecosystem and small efforts like these can have a truly meaning impact on pollinator well-being.”

IBM’s formal commitment to environmental sustainability dates back more than 50 years ago with a corporate environmental policy, Bendzsa added in a statement. She highlighted conservation and biodiversity as corporate values.

Google’s partnership with Free Range Beehives to install beehive boxes helps the corporation both support local businesses and protect the natural ecosystem, a spokesperson said.

They aren’t the only ones paying attention to pollinators on local and national scales. Giant Eagle, Walmart and Whole Foods ranked as the top three U.S. grocery stores taking steps to address pesticide use, which can present risks to both bees and people, according to Friends of the Earth’s Bee-Friendly Retailer Scorecard.

On top of pesticides, threats to bees also include climate change and an invasive mite, said John Rosol, co-founder of Free Range Beehives.

“We do still need to save the bees,” he said. “In Colorado alone, managed hives lose 42% of their colonies every single year, and that’s not a sustainable number.”

His company works with around 15 clients, taking care of almost 70 hives in the field. Around July and August when the hives reach their peaks, they each host between 50,000-60,000 bees.

“We put the bees at the site,” Rosol said. “We maintain them, we own them and the client gets to keep them as long as they want.”

Rosol described beekeeping as a “locality-dependent profession,” with climates and seasons affecting the insects in different ways. For instance, the Centennial State differs from California or Texas because of its harsher, longer winters and shorter growing seasons.

Colorado also has altitude, unpredictable weather, dry air and high-plains desert climate.

The state has a strong beekeeping community, with the Colorado Department of Agriculture highlighting “a large number of hobby beekeepers,” or those with less than 150 hives. Rocky Mountain Bee Supply at 24 S. Walnut St. in Colorado Springs supplies beekeepers with bees, hives, supplies and more, while To Bee or Not To Bee at 8280 West Coal Mine Avenue #16 in Littleton offers beekeeping classes and supplies.

Free Range Beehives was founded in 2020 by two father-son pairs. Not only does the team install and regularly inspect the beehives, but it also offers educational presentations, hive tours and honey extraction from the colonies for their clients’ employees to take home.

“Companies are using this as an effort to demonstrate to their employees and to the communities and to the state that they do business in that they’re good stewards of the environment,” said Free Range Beehives’ co-founder Dave Mathias.

The bees also provide “good marketing and PR opportunities,” he added.

So far, Free Range Beehives has chosen to remain in Colorado, with a short-term aspiration of maintaining pollinator populations from southern Colorado up to Fort Collins. Mathias noted they’re “pretty close to achieving that.”

Into the future, “our goal is to get as large as we can, so that we can have maximum impact,” Mathias said, listing Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Missouri as potential options for regional expansion.

Ultimately, though, their mission comes back to the bees.

“When you consider that one out of three bites of food that the average person eats is pollinated by a bee, the importance to our food supply and to our very existence as humans in quite literally dependent upon the bees thriving,” Mathias said.

More discussion on Denverpost.com

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: Colorado’s industry giants make room for beekeeping, save the population (denverpost.com)

WISHEK, N.D. — On Jan. 21, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first case of COVID-19 in the United States. More cases would follow, leading to officials putting in place travel restrictions and asking or telling people to stay at home. That’s the same timeframe in which bees that will spend their summers making honey on fields in North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota and surrounding states were preparing for their second act — pollinating in almond orchards on the West Coast.

“It’s the biggest paid pollination event on earth. And we were right in the middle of it,” says John Miller of Miller Honey Farms.

John Miller of Miller Honey says the coronavirus pandemic meant changes to supply chains and labor for beekeepers, but all the work still got done. Photo taken May 29, 2020. (Jenny Schlecht / Agweek)

Commercial beekeeping operations are multistate ventures. Bees summer in places like North Dakota — which leads the nation in honey production — but they spend winter and early spring resting in warmer climates and performing paid pollination services in places such as California. That means a lot of people and a lot of supplies cross state lines and move around a lot, especially in the months before the move back to the Northern Plains.

As the pandemic — and the restrictions that have gone along with it — accelerated, beekeepers had to change up their practices to meet restrictions and keep their employees and communities safe. But beekeepers are quick to point out that nothing about their work changed.

“The bees are going to keep being bees. It’s like anything in agriculture,” says Erik Dohn of Danzig Honey. “They’re not aware of what’s going on with humans.”

North Dakota leads the nation in honey production, which is produced during the summer months in the state. Danzig Honey sends most of its honey to a honey packer but packs a small amount for local sales. (Jenny Schlecht / Agweek)

“I don’t think there was ever a question in any bee guy’s mind of whether we were going to go or not. That wasn’t the consideration. We’re bee guys. It’s what we do. Cattle guys didn’t take a day off, the whole livestock segment and then fruits and vegetables too,” Miller says. “I don’t know anyone who took a day off.”

Making adjustments

Central and western North Dakota, Dohn explains, are hotspots for U.S. honey production. Danzig Honey, his family’s operation, has produced 26 million pounds of honey since 2000. While eastern North Dakota tends toward more production of row crops, parts farther west remain “cattle country,” Dohn says. That means more sweet clover, more alfalfa, more vegetation for bees. And, it means more commercial beekeepers have summer operations in those areas. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, North Dakota produced 39.6 million pounds of honey in 2019, followed by Montana at 14.72 million pounds. South Dakota was fourth at 11.985 million pounds.

Coming in at third in honey production for 2019 was California, with 13.735 million pounds. But the beekeeping industry’s California focus isn’t honey — it’s on pollination.
For many beekeepers, pollination has become the top priority and the top moneymaker. While Danzig Honey still focuses its efforts on honey production, Dohn says the winter pollination is of growing importance as agriculture changes.

Through a partnership with a California bee company, 90% of Danzig Honey bees pollinate almond orchards in California. Miller Honey bees also pollinate in almond orchards before moving into other crops like plums, apricots, cherries and more.

As the pandemic and the response to it grew, Miller says his company was able to continue operating without many problems. There were supply chain issues; things like rubber gloves, which beekeepers need for handling certain chemicals, were in hot demand. And then there were labor decisions that had to be made.

Miller Honey uses the H-2A temporary agricultural visa program, and their foreign employees arrived Jan. 15. Miller says H-2A employees have had opportunities to go home during low-points of past seasons.

“What if an employee wants to go home? They may. They are free to choose,” Miller says. “What then would be our response in protecting the remainder of the crew? So there was some anxiety. There is some anxiety.”

Miller says the other labor reality of what he calls the “new un-normal” is that Miller Honey traditionally had key employees travel to different points for important tasks. One key employee’s wife works at a care center in North Dakota and had strict compliance issues to adhere to, meaning sending her husband to another state could limit her ability to work.

“We then had a decision imposed on us that our key man would not travel and then return to North Dakota to avoid a potential exposure,” Miller says.

No one at Miller Honey has gotten sick. Miller says the crews adjusted to take care of their employees and to be respectful of their communities. When people did go into communities, the company made sure all employees had masks.

To read the Full Article go to:
https://www.agweek.com/business/agriculture/6517497-Multistate-beekeeping-operations-continue-through-pandemic

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Last fall the EPA published a new pesticide label originally for the foliar application of four neonicotinoid pesticides. By December, the EPA stated this new pesticide label language would be “harmonized” across all chemistries. The label was meant to protect pollinators.

The Pollinator Stewardship Council with the Bee Industry, sought a response from EPA’s Assistant Administrator clarifying our concerns with the new label. The Pollinator Stewardship Council received an answer from EPA, and Mr. Dave Hackenberg, representing the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, received a different letter from EPA (even though both groups along with AHPA and ABF signed the original letter). Both reply letters are attached.

The Office of Investigations for EPA stated in a letter to the Pollinator Stewardship Council, they will review our concerns and “a determination will be made as to the most appropriate course of action.” In the response to Mr. Hackenberg, Assistant Administrator Jones clarifies that contrary to the December EPA webinar this new label language is for the “four products formulated with the four nitroguanidine neonicotinoid chemicals (clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam) as well as two recently registered as active ingredients: tolfenpyrad and cyantraniliprole.” These last two pesticides are an addition to the original label adjustments presented August 15, 2013 by EPA for foliar applied neonics only. As to the concerns beekeepers expressed about the five conditions listed on the label past the “do not apply statement:” EPA stated to Mr. Hackenberg, “Both of the foregoing prohibitions, however, are subject to the exception listed in the “unless . . .” clause.” “. . . application would be legal if one of the five conditions is met . . .”(SEE BELOW)

The bee industry has its answer: any harm that comes to a beekeeper’s managed colonies due to a foliar application of clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, tolfenpyrad, and cyantraniliprole is the responsibility of the beekeeper. If bees are damaged or die due to a foliar application of a those products during bloom, and the application was made based on one of the five conditions, the fault of bee deaths lies with the beekeeper. Beekeepers must move their bees. No clarification was provided by EPA on what constitutes notifying a beekeeper to move their bees, if a State has a voluntary apiary registry program, or for the loss of a honey crop or crop pollination if bees are to be moved. The cost of time, labor, and loss of honey crop will be shouldered by the beekeeper.

While EPA has clarified the “conditions” will supercede the “do not apply” statement, the label still has undefined terms, features an icon that defies culturally accepted warnings, and native pollinators will continue to be harmed and killed. Again, the EPA now states the new label will only be required for foliar applications of clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, and the two new products tolfenpyrad and cyantraniliprole.

The Pollinator Stewardship Council encourages beekeepers to document their costs due to moving bees in relation to this new label language for foliar applications of clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, tolfenpyrad, and cyantraniliprole. Also, document if and when you are notified to move your bees.

Directions for Use

It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling

FOR FOOD CROPS AND COMMERCIALLY GROWN ORNAMENTALS NOT UNDER CONTRACT FOR POLLINATION SERVICES BUT ARE ATTRACTIVE TO POLLINATORS

Do not apply this product while bees are foraging. Do not apply this product until flowering is complete and all petals have fallen, UNLESS…

EPAs conditions

 The application is made to the target site after sunset.
 The application is made to the target site when the temperature is below 55 degrees F.
 The application is made in accordance with a government-initiated public health response.
 The application is made in accordance with an active state-administered apiary registry program where beekeepers are notified no less than 48 hours prior to the time of planned application so that the bees can be removed, covered or otherwise protected prior to spraying.

 The application is made due to an imminent threat of significant crop loss, and a documented determination consistent with an IPM plan or predetermined economic threshold is met. Every effort should be made to notify the beekeepers no less than 48-hours prior to the time of the planned application so that the bees can be removed, covered or otherwise protected prior to spraying.