Protecting the pollinators

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 25th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: honeybees make a comeback.

We’ve heard for years that honeybees are in decline. But honey bee populations have turned a corner, according to numbers from the USDA’s most recent report.

World Journalism Institute graduate Juliana Undseth talked with a beekeeper in Sioux Center, Iowa and brings us this report.

AUDIO: A little tap. Oh! That’s a lot of bees!

JULIANA UNDSETH: Ron Rynders is smoking—smoking a beehive so he doesn’t get stung. The smoke calms the bees and that allows for closer inspections. Rynders pulls out a wooden frame. It’s about a foot by a foot and a half and it’s covered with bees.

RON RYNDERS: Here's a little bee that just hatched. You can tell by her color. She's a runner; she ought to go out for cross country.

Rynders likes to run with them. He’s been keeping bees for the last three-and-a-half decades and since retiring from Dordt University 16 years ago, it’s been his full-time retirement hobby. Today this hive is crowded. Rynders is going to need to add more space so the bees don’t swarm and find a new home.

But hives haven’t always flourished like this. Back in 2006, bees began simply disappearing.

RYNDERS: The beekeeper back when this all got started would come to his or her hive, and voila, there's no bees; they all flew away to die.

For years, explanations for that were hard to come by, but it does have a name: Colony Collapse Disorder. The last thing a bee-keeper wants is to lose them.

RYNDERS: It's always gonna be catastrophic when you, when you open your hive in the spring and they're all dead. That's very sad. It's disheartening.

They do know the primary cause: Tiny mites called Varro. They burrow into the backs of bees, exposing them to viruses and bacteria. Varroa mites are deadly. Beekeepers have found ways to combat these invasions. There are safe methods and others not so safe, like superheating an acid that is deadly to Varroa mites. Once, Rynders burned down a hive that way.

RYNDERS: So I immediately took the whole thing apart and started casting these frames all over and they all went out. And so that was the loss of a hive. It’s probably the biggest catastrophe I’ve ever had.

A safer way is to hang a six-inch strip of yellowish-white plastic inside the hive. The strip delivers a medication called Apivar.

RYNDERS: This is the medicine that kills the Varroa, but it is now expended, so I can take it out…

Beekeepers have faced some record losses in recent years, but the number of bees worldwide has increased since 1990. Rynders says that the most important thing for beekeepers is good stewardship. Farmers and others can help by minimizing pesticide use and planting flowers.

RYNDERS: I think we have to wake up as a community and especially an agricultural community, that there are waterways, and there are roadsides, and there are all kinds of places on everybody's farm, where we could intentionally set up a habitat that was friendly to our pollinator friends, whether we need them or not in our crop. We just need to do it, because we're stewards of God's creation, for crying out loud. That's what it's all about.

To cultivate good stewardship, Rynders started a beekeeping club nearly twenty years ago, around the same time that Colony Collapse Disorder first appeared.

RYNDERS: It was created simply to educate, educate, educate. So there's always a cross pollination, if you will, of ideas. We all hold hands, and that's basically what bees do, too. (laughs) Yeah.

John Baas is a hobbyist beekeeper who says that Rynders taught him everything he knows. Rynders has been helpful in other ways, too. Once, Baas was out of town during a windstorm, Rynders was quick to check on his bees.

BAAS: Ron just jumped in his pickup truck in the middle of a, you know, hurricane to go check on my bees, you know – thinks nothing of it.

It’s that kind of care and mentorship that will help bees the most.

RYNDERS: If you really went out and asked a beekeeper, he'd say, ‘Well, yeah, they will go into decline if you don't do something about it. But if you do something about it, they're fine.’ The truth is, bees are fine. God is fine. Creation is fine. We can do this. Yeah. (laughs)

Beekeepers like Ron Rynders are an important part of the bees’ comeback.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Juliana Undseth in Sioux Center, Iowa.

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