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S C I E N C E

BUZZabout

pollinators

the

BY ALEXIS MARIE ADAMS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LEE

M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R L Y 55

n a warm fall day outside of stevensville in western montana, Jacob Wustner’s apiary is buzzing with clouds of honey bees. It’s also rustling like corn leaves in the wind—with the sound of hundreds of thousands of bees hard at work within the hives, building and cleaning wax cells, guarding their colonies and turning nectar into honey. A second-generation Montana

beekeeper, Wustner sells his honey at the Clark Fork Farmers’ Market in Missoula and at farm stands in the Bitterroot Valley. His annual harvest—about 1,000 to 2,000 pounds—is a drop in the proverbial bucket of Montana’s honey production.

Consistently one of the nation’s top honey producers, Montana ranked second in the country in 2014 when the state’s bees churned out 14 million pounds of honey, valued at about $29 million, according to Cam Lay, state entomologist for the Montana Department of Agriculture. But at a wholesale price of $1.50 per pound as of the writing of this story—prices vary significantly from year to year—honey doesn’t generate the lion’s share of the profits for most commercial beekeepers. They earn that by providing what are called “pollination services,” shipping their colonies to California’s Central Valley for the almond bloom in February and then to the apple and cherry orchards of Oregon and Washington. This year, beekeep-ers earned approximately $180 to $200 per hive to pollinate almonds. “If you can put 400 hives on a flatbed truck and haul them to California, you’re going to earn a pretty good income,” says Lay.

O

Ecology professor Laura Burkle hunts for insects pollinating flowers on an early spring day in front of Mount Ellis, east of Bozeman, as part of her scientific research.

From left, Justin Runyon, Laura Burkle and Will Glenny study the effects of global warming on the scent of flowers and the insects that pollinate the flowers. At far right, each plant being studied is measured.

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Though apiarists use the European honey bee, which arrived in North America with early colonists in the 17th century, pollination neither begins nor ends there. Approximately 200,000 other animal species around the world are pollinators, including more than 20,000 differ-ent species of wild bees, 3,999 of them here in North America. Other pollinators include butterflies, humming-birds, geckos, midges, lemurs, beetles and some species of bats. Here in Montana, Anna’s hummingbirds and black-chinned hummingbirds pollinate honeysuckle, scarlet paintbrush and columbine. Orchard mason bees pollinate fruit trees and berry bushes. Flower beetles feed on the pollen of sunflowers and yarrow. The Great Basin bumble bee and the mountain bumble bee pollinate shooting stars and silky lupine as well as tomatoes, eggplants and peppers using a behavior called buzz pollination: grasping a flower in her jaws, the bee vibrates her wings to release pollen packed tightly in the anther, the filament at the end

of a flower’s stamen, where sacs contain pollen. Standing with Wustner in what appears to be and

sounds like a perfectly healthy and productive apiary, it is difficult to imagine that honey bees and other pollinators around the world are in trouble. From April 2014 to April 2015, beekeepers in the United States lost more than 42 percent of their honey bee colonies, after a 34.2 percent loss the previous year. Wild pollinators are declining too. In late February of this year, an international group of researchers affiliated with the United Nations released the first global assessment of pollinators. They found that more than 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species, particularly bees and butterflies, and some 16 percent of vertebrate pollinators, such as birds and bats, are being “driven toward extinction.” In a 2013 paper in Science, researchers described a 50 percent decline in bumble bee species in an Illinois forest. In March, federal wild-life biologists said they were considering placing the

M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R L Y 57

western bumble bee on the endangered species list. Pollinators are known as “keystone species”—ones

that have a disproportionately large effect on other species in a community. Their fate is inextricably linked to the fate of countless other plants and animals scattered over vast, ostensibly disconnected landscapes. In other words, their fate is linked to ours. The decline of pollinators means a lot more than a shortage of honey; it threatens the very food crops we depend on for our sustenance. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, bees, birds, bats and other creatures pollinate one out of every three bites of food we consume in the United States. What’s more, compared to self-pollinated and wind- pollinated crops (think rice and wheat), pollinator- dependent foods (such as nuts, berries, and citrus) provide a disproportionate share of vitamins and minerals. About 90 percent of the globe’s wild plants also depend on pollinators for survival. Without them, the plants can’t reproduce. According to another 2013 study in the journal Science, wild pollinators are twice as effective as domesticated honey bees in producing seeds and fruit on crops including almonds, coffee, oilseed rape, tomatoes and strawberries. So the decline of wild pollinators may pose an even more alarming threat to crop yields than the loss of honey bees.

Like other domesticated animal species, honey bees are managed and, to a degree, their losses can be too. Beekeepers routinely add sugar or corn syrup to compen-sate for the lack of wild forage. They also split their surviv-ing colonies in the spring, making two hives from one. This practice reduces honey production, but it keeps colony numbers high enough to meet pollination demands. Wild pollinators aren’t so lucky.

Here in Montana, the threats to these creatures intertwine and mirror the causes of pollina-tor decline elsewhere. Researchers point to habitat destruction, climate change, parasites

and the intensive, industrial-scale agricultural systems

that are now common in North America, specifically to two facets of industrial agriculture: monoculture—vast fields devoted to a single crop, which deprives pollina-tors of a varied diet and leaves them malnourished and weakened—and widespread and intensive pesticide use, particularly a controversial group of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. Studies have suggested neonicotinoids can impair bees’ navigational skills, foraging efficiency and memories and slow their rates of reproduction. Use of these chemicals has increased significantly over the last decade across the United States and globally. Applications of clothianidin, a neonicotinoid, on corn in Iowa alone almost doubled between 2011 and 2013. Yet the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in the EU concluded in 2012 that neonicotinoids posed an “unacceptable” danger to bees; this resulted in a continent-wide ban on three

“We don’t have a great sense of which pollinator species are here today. Nor do we have adequate historical data to compare current populations to. As a result, we have no real sense of decline, but we can make general guesses.”

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neonics in 2013. In April, Ortho, the garden-care company owned by Scotts Miracle-Gro, announced that it will stop using neonicotinoids in three products for roses, trees, and shrubs by next year and phase out the chemicals’ use by 2021 in eight of its pesticide products, in hopes of saving declining pollinator populations. One of the lead-ing manufacturers of neonicotinoids, Bayer CropScience, a subsidiary of German chemical-pharmaceutical giant Bayer, continues to sell products containing neonics for agricultural, home garden and landscaping use, such as its 2-In-1 Systemic Rose & Flower Care, which has an active pesticide ingredient of imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid. The EPA is currently reviewing the neonic class of pesticides to assess its risk to pollinators.

Working from her lab at Montana State University in Bozeman, ecologist Dr. Laura Burkle directs several research projects that focus on wild pollinators. The proj-ects range from looking at how pollinators help landscapes recover after wildfire to investigating how different compo-nents of climate change, such as drought, temperature and carbon dioxide levels, may influence the plant traits, like scent, that attract pollinators. But Montana suffers from a lack of information about wild pollinators.

“We don’t have a great sense of which polli-nator species are here today,” Burkle says. “Nor do we have adequate historical data to compare current populations to. As a result, we have no real sense of decline, but we can make general guesses. For example, today the Golden Triangle [of north central Montana] is full of wheat. Before the region was ever plowed under, it was full of wildflowers and it’s likely it was full of wild pollinators then, too. Today, it’s not.”

Another MSU researcher, Dr. Michelle Flenniken, focuses on honey bees and the viruses, bacteria, fungi and mites that infect them. “The annual losses of honey bee colonies are alarming,” she says. “And they’re unsustainable. Imagine being a livestock producer and losing 33 percent of your cows every year. Research in my lab is focused on the big epidemiological questions behind honey bee health. It’s a complex puzzle and it’s easy for people to blame climate change or agricultural chemicals, for example, but we have to obtain data on the role of these and other factors on colony health before implicating any one of them as the main cause of colony losses.”

One thing Flenniken does point to as key to

pollinator health is habitat. “There’s good evidence for the benefits of CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) lands,” she says. “The more of these we have, the health-ier bees are.”

Lay agrees, “We used to leave the edges of fields to grow weeds and wildflowers,” he says. “Now we plow and plant everything to get more production. This means there’s little left to feed the bees.”

In May of last year, the Obama Administration issued a National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators. One of the strategy’s goals was to increase understanding of wild pollinators by training more researchers to identify them and by devoting resources to develop better genetic and species-classification tools. The strategy also calls for the creation of 7 million acres of corridors of pollinator-friendly habitat. In October of 2015, the Department of Agriculture announced a grant to provide more than $4 million to farmers, ranchers and other landowners in six states—including Montana—to plant food for bees.

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Using organic and what he calls “beyond organic” hive management practices, 32-year-old Wustner is trying to reverse the honey bee’s demise, beginning with his own bees. He avoids pesti-

cides and antibiotics, instead selectively breeding his colo-nies with feral bees to propagate a smaller, hardier bee that is resistant to pests and diseases. To further bolster their strength, he feeds his bees honey and pollen rather than the sugar water commonly used by commercial beekeepers, and he surrounds them with a mix of flora—rather than just one crop—ensuring that they get a varied diet.

“Bees are designed to eat food that’s rich with the wild bacteria, yeast and fungi their immune systems depend on,” he tells me. “Sugar doesn’t contain these substances. And bees are a little bit like humans. If they eat too much sugar, and not enough whole foods, they get sick.”

Wustner’s bees browse the fields and mountain foothills within a mile or two of his hives. Their fodder is diverse, but they primarily feed on spotted knapweed. Designated a noxious weed and considered a scourge by most here in Montana, knapweed is a boon to Wustner and other

regional beekeepers. “It produces some of the best honey in the world,” he says. “It’s light in color and because it has a low moisture content, it doesn’t granulate easily. And then there’s its flavor, flowery and delicious.”

Wustner, too, has suffered colony losses—70 percent of his hives between last fall and this spring—but this didn’t come as a surprise to him. “I expect high losses because I’m doing treatment-free beekeeping and selec-tively breeding from the survivors. I stopped treating most of my colonies in 2013. Every year since has been differ-ent. Although I’ve had successes, I’ve also had failures. Coming from a commercial background and transition-ing into organic management, the learning curve has been steep. My mentors didn’t teach me how to manage bees this way. I’m learning it from scratch and much of it is trial and error. I expect it to get better, but I’m not to the point where I can say I have disease-resistant bees yet. Breeding for disease resistance isn’t as easy and it takes time.”

“But,” he says, holding a frame teeming with honey bees up toward the sun, “bees feed the world. So, it’s worth it.”