PLAINFIELD — Troy Hall is on the vanguard of a movement to use evolution to goad honeybees to be more resilient to the varroa mite, the parasite that embeds itself into their exoskeletons and creates a door to the virulent viruses that routinely decimate their populations.
Unlike most beekeepers, he does not administer a miticide to protect the tens of thousands of bees that reside in his 600 hives centered around his Plainfield-based apiary, where he breeds queens bees and also sells honey.
“I’m letting nature have that selection force, and I select from the survivors,” he said.
The tactic was successful for about 10 years, until he lost 85% of his honeybees last winter. He had to supplement his hives with “package bees” sourced from farther south for the first time since his days as an amateur beekeeper about 15 years ago.
“In agriculture, you can never rest on your laurels — things are constantly shifting or moving or evolving,” he said.
Last year, dry weather weakened the bees going into the winter.
“Drought conditions left them nutritionally stressed and environmentally stressed. Then you throw the varroa mite into the mix of that,” he said.
This year’s rain brought its own challenges. He said that his bees usually forage from basswood and linden in early July, but they were not able to take advantage of that nectar resource because of the heavy rain.
Weather extremes over the last two years confronted bees with a wide gamut of contradictory challenges. Under dry conditions, soil quality declines and plants do not produce much nectar. That left bees unable to feed their young, in turn reducing their ability to reproduce faster than the mites that invade their hives.
This July reversed conditions, bringing heavy rain. Honeybees limit foraging in rainy, cool weather — they are cold-blooded insects and struggle to fly in low temperatures. But the rains also set the stage for a hardy population of wildflowers later in the season, which could carry them through the winter.
Brooke Decker, Vermont’s pollinator health specialist, said that many beekeepers saw a hard winter last year.
“If bees don’t have a lot of good forage in the late summer, they’re more likely to die over the winter,” she said.
While the bees struggled to find the food that would keep them strong, the viruses that the mites carry have been steadily getting stronger. The end of the drought this summer brought more favorable conditions.
“There was good spring flow of honey and, since then, the bees have eaten a lot of the honey because they were not able to forage. That mid- to late-summer flow has basically been washed away,” she said. “It could pick back up again if we don’t get a lot of rain.”
Decker said that when rain falls fast, it washes the nectar out of flowers and the waterlogged pollen does not stick to pollinators easily, stymieing the bees’ work.
Rain or no rain, mid-August is often a “dearth” period for bees as they wait for late summer wildflowers. They may forage, but they are not packing away large stores of honey. She said that bees need to visit 2 million flowers to make just one pound of honey.
“The rain might have been a bit of a blessing,” Decker said.
So long as further heavy rains don’t wash out the nectar, July’s rain may lead to a hardy wildflower crop that will strengthen the bees going into winter.
The goldenrod, a popular plant for bees, has already started to bloom. The Japanese knotweed, an invasive that benefits bees, will provide troves of nectar into early fall.
Mike Hebb, who tends six hives in South Strafford, operates on an exponentially smaller scale than commercial beekeepers like Hall.
Small-scale beekeepers like Hebb have already reaped benefits from the rain. He said that he saw 10 times as much honey as last year, with a rapid mid-July flow.
“There was rain at the right the time — right when the flowers are ready to bloom,” he said.
Although the bees struggle to fly in the heavy rain, he saw his bees busily foraging in the dry intervals.
Meanwhile, Hall has placed his hopes in the late-blooming wildflowers and the 15% of his bees that survived last summer.
“I’m not being foolish. It is happening. It is possible,” he said.
“There are so many things shifting and shaping and moving, but there is resistance being built into the bee population.”
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727- 3242.