Wildfires add to honeybees’ survival woes
The flatbed truck was laden with chickens and honey as Caroline Yelle sped away from her Vacaville apiary, away from the flames licking the ridgeline. The honeybees would have to stay behind.
By the time she returned, more than half of her 700 bee hives were reduced to ashes. The surrounding hills, once thick with yellow star thistle where the bees gathered pollen, were stone gray and barren from the Hennessey Fire.
Yelle, owner of Pope Canyon Queens, is among the many beekeepers trying to rebuild after a historically destructive wildfire season that consumed millions of acres statewide. The wildfires dealt yet another devastating blow to the allimportant pollinator already facing myriad challenges, from mite infestations to widespread colony collapse.
Even for beekeepers who didn’t lose hives to the flames, the vast amounts of smoke hampered honey production by disrupting the bees’ natural routines. The fires also destroyed vegetation where bees forage for nectar and pollen.
When honeybees smell smoke, the effect is “like a fire drill on a submarine,” said Chris Conrad, owner of Bee Conscious Removal in Santa Rosa.
Smoke disrupts the insects’ alarm pheromones — that’s why beekeepers often use small amounts of smoke when working on their hives. Rather than flee, the bees zoom inside the hive and gorge on honey deposits.
It’s just one reason for the bees’ seemingly paradoxical tendency to stay put, rather than retreat from wildfires. Another reason they rarely abscond: The queen’s heavy abdomen makes her too heavy to fly on short notice and the bees will not abandon her.
“If the fires come licking around, they’ll hunker down and try to survive,” said Conrad, who tends about four dozen hives. “They may run out of food, but they’ll die in the box.”
It’s a phenomenon that Napa and San Francisco beekeeper Jeffrey MacMullen knows well. The owner of We Be Honey lost several colonies in Napa to smoke in the early autumn months, as wildfire smoke drifted from the Glass Fire. The bees that survived required constant care and supervision after weeks of smokedarkened skies prevented them from foraging for pollen.
Many of the surviving hives depleted their stores of honey in the weeks the bees spent hunkered down as fires raged outside. The bees could die over the winter if they run out of honey. That’s why MacMullen gave his hives supplemental sugar syrup to sustain them, a common practice among beekeepers.
“My approach is making sure bees don’t starve and they have something for winter,” he said one recent afternoon as he prepared his wares for a farmers market.
The winter months are a crucial time in the life of a bee colony, said Doug Vincent, owner of Bee Kind in Sebastopol. By midDecember, the queen begins laying eggs that will grow into adult bees by the time the first blossoms appear on the almond trees in February.
After an autumn of intensely smoky days, some hives may be weaker heading into the winter months, Vincent said, but they should rebound if they make it to next year.
As cold weather descends on Northern California, many beekeepers plan to rebuild come spring. The honey harvesting season typically runs from March through June. Yelle, of Pope Canyon Queens, will use the winter months to slowly replace the beekeeping boxes and other equipment she lost in the fire.
The two cases of honey she salvaged in the nighttime escape from her Vacaville apiary are all that remain of this year’s honey harvest.
“Twentyfour jars of honey — that’s all that is left of 2020,” she said. “Everything left means so much more.”