Sweetening the SA honey pot

JEOPARDY: LOCAL BEES NEED NON-INDIGENOUS PLANTS

We rely a lot on non-native species

Beekeeper asks people to become Honey Bee Heroes, adopt a hive for R1 500.

Human love for honey goes way back – all the way to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians, Assyrians, and so on. One of the earliest names for Pharaohs was “Bee King”.

Beekeepers have been moving hives from field to field for pollination for over 5 000 years, but bee culture has been a thing since 4500BC.

That’s true in South Africa too: research has pointed to Khoi San honey consumption dating back almost 40 000 years, and several early Khoi San cave paintings depict bees and honey harvesting.

In the winter of 2006, beekeepers in America started reporting massive hive losses.

Their colonies were dying, but there was something remarkably different to normal pesticide poisoning or disease: no dead bee bodies.

The worker bees were just abandoning the queen and bee babies to fend for themselves, causing the hive to quickly die off.

Colony Collapse Disorder was born, and soon beekeepers around the world were signalling red alert.

Beekeepers and animal rights advocates blamed farming pesticides like neonicotinoids, a nicotine-based insecticide that interferes with a honeybee’s navigation so it can’t find its way home.

Farmers and the chemical pesticide lobby blamed parasites like the Varroa destructor, a honeybee parasite that spread globally in the late 20th century.

Climate change crusaders blamed increasingly volatile weather.

But experts, like Mike Allsop, argue that the real problem is the beekeepers themselves.

If pesticides and parasites are responsible, says Allsop, “why is it that Europe has banned pesticides and bee losses have continued? Why are parasites such a major issue there and not elsewhere? Because of the practices of the beekeepers themselves”.

In ancient times, there were only two types of honeybees: the European honeybee and the African honeybee. The Sahara Desert was – and for the most part, remains – a natural barrier between the two.

Because of their calm temperament and easy maintenance (according to one local beekeeper, the European bee is a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10 for aggression while the African bee is a 9), European honeybees became the primary honeybee for beekeeping worldwide.

But breeding practices and mismanagement have made these bees very susceptible to disease.

European breeders “have turned their bees into little poodles”, Allsop says.

“Bees are being bred ... against defensive behaviour, stinging and swarming. They can’t look after themselves.”

Thankfully, in SA, beekeepers don’t typically push their bees to the limit. But the local bee industry is still at risk, though for a different reason: forage.

Paul van Rensburg is a beekeeper in Somerset West with 60 hives.

He explains: “Because the fynbos flowering season is so restricted, there are no indigenous flowers after November. So we rely a lot on eucalyptus trees and other non-native species.”

Unfortunately, the government’s Working for Water initiative is actively removing alien foliage countrywide. That includes the eucalyptus, which bees feed on to produce almost 70% of SA’s honey.

So SA beekeeping numbers are on a steady decline. The industry is ageing, and few young commercial beekeepers are entering.

Chris Oosthuizen became interested in the honeybee industry in February last year and is self-taught.

He has started Honey Bee Heroes, an adopt-a-hive programme where patrons can pay R1 500 and have a new hive dedicated to them.

He hopes to introduce a sponsorship programme where patrons can front the costs of setting up 10 hives for a low-income South African, hosted on longterm sites he’s secured from local farmers.