This time last year the bees would have been on the South Plains, around Lubbock, pollinating that area’s cotton crop. But beekeeper Clint Walker isn’t taking his bees to Lubbock this summer. They are firmly ensconced in a field with a lot of snow–on–the–prairie, a milkweed.
The honey coming from the Knob Hill apiary this summer is white and not all that tasty. It burns the back of your throat if you try to eat it. Walker can’t use the honey but he’s skittish about sending his bees out to pollinate row crops anymore.
“I just didn’t like what I saw when the bees came back from Lubbock,” Walker said during a visit to the hive on Knob Hill last week. “They made a good honey crop and they looked healthy and strong but I never liked what I saw. It was more of a gut feeling,” he said.
Knob Hill slopes away to the northwest where, on a clear day, you can see the Temple skyline. The air is alive with bees on a mission - to produce that inedible white honey. The bees don’t know the difference. They don’t know that Walker is sacrificing the honey to protect the 60 or so colonies he keeps at Knob Hill.
Walker uses a smoker to subdue the bees but assures visitors that the bees are too busy to worry about stinging anybody that day, a bold statement that proves to be at least partially false.
Temperatures are closing in on 100 degrees but life is good for the Knob Hill bees. The brood is strong and the queen is healthy, active and fertile.
“See there,” Walker says to a photographer there to document the daily life of the apiary. He points to a tiny speck in one colony. “It’s using its mandibles to break the wax cap. See. You can see the little antenna poking out. It’s going to be here in a couple of minutes.”
In about half that time, the newest member of the colony is drying its wings and wobbling around on unsteady legs.
“Twenty–one days ago, she was an egg,” Walker notes. “She’s a little wobbly now, kind of like a new foal, but she will get her legs under her real quick. In an hour she’ll be at work.”
A few minutes later Walker holds out his hand to the photographer. “Want a picture of a bee stinging a man?” he asks cheerfully.
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Clint Walker’s grandfather started Walker Honey in 1929 when a drought devastated local farmers and he was forced to sell a grocery he owned with his uncle in Gause, in Milam County. Several people in Milam County ran small beekeeping operations at that time and Walker’s grandfather bought one of them. He put his bees on local cotton until farmers began using arsenic on their crop to kill pests. The arsenic killed everything, including honeybees.
“That shows you how things in this business turn out to be cyclical,” he said. “That’s not so different from what’s happening now.”
Grandfather Walker took his bees to the Rio Grande Valley in the winter and moved them to Colorado for the summer, renting the bees to farmers to pollinate their crops. Clint Walker’s father bought the business in the 1960s and located it nearRogers.
Clint Walker bought the business in 1994. He sells queen bees, honey and products made from honey and pollen. Until this year he rented his bees to farmers who needed to pollinate their row crops. He will probably continue to keep his bees in Rogers until researchers get a handle on what’s causing bee colonies to collapse.
Not long after Walker’s bees got back from Lubbock last year, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) hit bees on the East Coast.
Bees were disappearing, leaving their hives and not returning. Beekeepers were checking their hives and finding not dead bees, as had been the case with varroa mite outbreaks and other afflictions, but nothing at all. The bees were just gone. The malady soon spread to 24 states and Europe.
The ramifications of a severely depleted honeybee population are staggering. Bees pollinate one third of the world’s food supply and are also indirectly responsible for hay, clover and alfalfa that is fed to cattle. Berries that wildlife depends on are also pollinated by bees. A study by Cornell University in 2000 found that honeybees deliver a direct benefit of $14.6 billion a year to the U.S. economy.
Researchers with the CCD Working Group have pointed out a number of possible causes for the widespread collapse.
Today’s full–time beekeepers ship their bees all over the country to pollinate everything from almonds in California to blueberries in Maine. Researchers can’t say yet whether CCD might stem from the stress of being shipped all over the country, a virus or pesticides.
Among the pesticides under scrutiny are a class known as neonicotinoids, which aren’t toxic to humans and do a good job of controlling pests. But the pesticides are toxic to bees, and the question is whether or not the chemicals are moving through the plant to the nectar and pollen.
“Something is disorienting the bees,” Walker says. “You find one out in the field that starved to death so you can say that was the cause of death, but if something made that bee unable to find its way home to the hive, that’s why it starved to death.”
Regardless, the bees on Knob Hill are staying home this year.
