Online Feature

Bees & Mead, Oh My!  //  Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer

The honeybee is a common sight in Colorado during the summer. They buzz busily around our gardens and yards, foraging for the delicious nectar they need for survival. The bee is a fascinating and complicated insect, but the issues surrounding the honeybee are even more complex.

HONEYBEES 101

 

The honeybee has always played a vital part in agriculture. One in every three bites of food is dependent upon honeybees and out of the 90 most consumed fruits and vegetables, 70 are dependent on honeybees.

 

There are no wild honeybees and this means the bees visiting the flowers in your yard came from a hive up to five miles away. A healthy hive houses approximately 60,000 bees and 99 percent are female. About half the bees in a hive leave the hive daily to search for pollen and nectar, while the other half stays with the queen and attends to the brood.

 

Beth Conrey, of Berthoud, is President of the Colorado State Beekeepers Association. She has been keeping bees for over a decade and is well versed in the issues surrounding honeybees both on a national and state level.

 

“Beekeeping is always fraught with difficulty. The major problem now is the varroa destructor. When it marched out here in the 1980s, no one was prepared because there was no way to do so,” says Conrey. “Beekeeping in the way that it used to be came to a quick and decisive end. You can no longer keep bees – you have to manage bees. You can’t just let them be. They’ll die.”

 

The varroa destructor is a parasitic mite that attacks honeybees, and a mite infestation will lead to the death of an entire bee colony.  While large-scale beekeepers that depend on pollination contracts treat their bees chemically for mites, smaller beekeepers like Conrey do not.

 

Beekeepers are battling numerous problems surrounding bees; the most recent was Colony Collapse Disorder, an issue that received a lot of media attention. The phenomenon of honeybee colonies mysteriously dying began in the mid-2000s across the globe. While people have pointed to pesticides, mites and lack of quality food for the bees, there is still no definitive answer as to what is causing colony collapse.

 

THE STATE OF THE HONEYBEE IN COLORADO

 

The National Agricultural Statistics Service tracks beekeeping losses across the country. In the last four to five years, beekeepers in the U.S. have been losing about 30 to 40 percent of their honeybees each year.

 

Colorado comes in a little higher than the national average, but Conrey believes the large number of hobby beekeepers in the state is part of the reason for the higher loss numbers. For example, if a hobby beekeeper has two hives and loses just one, they’ve lost 50 percent of their bees.

 

Conrey keeps 55 hives, some in Berthoud backyards and others on agricultural land in the surrounding the area. Honey production is down 50 percent over the last four years in Colorado, and Conrey’s hives have followed the trend. Where a hive used to produce 130 pounds of honey, they now average around 65 pounds.

 

“My bees came out of winter very well, because we didn’t really have a winter,” she says. “Our losses were about 35 percent, and that’s better than we usually have, because being chemical free our losses are usually around 60 percent.”

 

Bees die from the big issues already addressed, such as mites and colony collapse, but there are other factors as well. Conrey had to move several hives off of a local farm because the bees were starving to death. A change in agricultural practices in the area meant there was a lack of forage for the bees.

 

While pesticides have become safer in the last 30 years, they are still designed to kill insects and honeybees are insects. While local beekeepers and farmers try to work together, there are still losses due to spraying crops.

 

The mass media often portrays the issues surrounding pesticides and bees as an “agricultural” problem, but Conrey points out that while agriculture is regulated, urban and suburban land practices are not.

 

“Treatment rates and exposure levels to these same chemicals in urban and suburban areas are appalling compared to agriculture,” she says.

 

Conrey and other beekeepers advocate integrated pest management (IMP) practices as promoted by the Integrated Pest Management Institute at Colorado State University. IPM uses a variety of controls previous to the point of chemical controls. For example, IPM endorses digging up a dandelion as opposed to killing it with a chemical. Resistancy, tillage practices and field change practices are all strategies of IPM. Learn more at ColoradoIPMCenter.agsci.colostate.edu.

 

COMBINING BEES & BUSINESS

 

Many Colorado beekeepers relish the reward that come with keeping bees, and that’s the delectable honey. However, one Northern Colorado beekeeper has taken it a step further. Greg and Kim Bowdish are the owners of Hunters Moon Meadery in Severance, Colorado.

 

They’ve been keeping bees and making mead for over a decade, and several years ago they decided to make a small business out of this venture. By December 2011, Hunters Moon Meadery’s meads were on liquor store shelves. Since then, their mead has won medals at the prestigious Mazer Cup, and new products are being tested every day.

 

Greg Bowdish is the current president pro tem of the Northern Colorado Beekeepers Association and an engineer. He started out as a beer brewer, but he was intrigued by the history of mead, and the versatility of the product.

 

“With grapes you are limited to the variety of the grapes, but with mead you can add any flavor,” he says. “You can add grapes, malt, hops, any spice or fruit you want – the sky is the limited in terms of flavor profiles.”

 

There is around a quarter of a cup of honey in a 750 ml bottle of mead. Bowdish, who has 50 hives around Northern Colorado, says he has been averaging about 58 pounds of honey per productive hive. Last year, he had one hive that yielded 150 pounds, and this year he has two he expects will produce nearly 90 pounds.

 

While mead has grown in popularity over the last several years, Hunters Moon Meadery is one of only two meaderies in Colorado using honey from their own bees. Keeping bees means that Bowdish knows the history of the honey and has control over the product from start to finish.

 

“There’s a lot of honey coming into the United States from China and other places where they use some pretty harsh chemicals to keep their bees alive and that stuff can get into the honey,” he says. “Not that our bees aren’t subject to some pesticides, because they certainly are.”

 

Bowdish works closely with the farmers who own the land where he keeps his hives, paying honey rent and keeping apprised of agricultural practices.

 

“Keeping the lines of communications open is absolutely critical,” says Bowdish.

 

The resurgence in the popularity of mead is undeniable. Just a few years ago there were less than 100 wineries making mead in the U.S., and now there are more than 300. At The Mazer Cup International, held in Boulder earlier this year, there were 600 entries from all over the world.

 

At The Mazer Cup International, Hunters Moon Meadery’s Sweet Mountain Berry won a silver medal, and their coffee mead won bronze. Jeff Crabtree, of Crabtree Brewing in Greeley, took home a gold medal at Mazor Cup and a silver at the World Beer Cup for his Ménage á Trois. Bowdish and Crabtree collaborated on the Ménage á Trois, a rich blend of spices, mead and beer.

 

A list of where to find Hunters Moon meads is located on their website at www.HuntersMoonMeadery.com. The meadery is open by appointment only.

 

“Mead is really an interesting product. I urge people to explore mead, not just our products, but others as well,” says Bowdish.

 

Like the bees that provide the honey, the study of mead is fascinating and multifaceted, and both subjects have a long history. After all, honeybees are believed to have lived on earth for millions of years, and mead is one of the first fermented beverages to have been imbibed by our hunter gather ancestors.

 

Beth Conrey hopes people will attempt to understand bees, and realize their vital place in the world. For more information on the honeybee visit the Colorado State Bee Keepers Association online at www.ColoradoBeekeepers.org.

 

 

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer is a freelance writer and journalist. She is also the Mayor of HeidiTown.com, a blog about events, festivals & destination in Colorado.

 

August 6, 2012