Apiculture 101: Meet Beekeeper Stan Bader

By Jessica Rath​​

​There are few creatures I find more fascinating than bees living in a  colony. A large community of beings that act almost like a single organism: each individual member of the collective acts to further the wellbeing of the whole. Doesn’t this sound like something we humans should emulate a little?

The Beekeepers, 1568, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Public Domain.

​People have been keeping bees for over 7,000 years. And yet, bees are not domesticated – they live the same way, whether in a beehive or in a hollowed-out tree. They are independent, and while they don’t need humans to live, the equivalent statement “humans don’t need bees” is incorrect. We very much need bees for pollination of many fruit trees, vegetables, nuts, and beans.
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Over the last ten or so years I read a lot about bees getting ill, colony collapse, and other rather worrisome news. When I learned that Stan Bader, proprietor of the Abiquiú vineyard Las Parras, also kept bees, I decided to talk to him and learn more about these fascinating insects, the diseases that plague them, and what methods beekeepers apply to keep their bees healthy. I found that Stan is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to bees, and he kindly shared some of his extensive knowledge with me.
 
Stan’s father was a dairy farmer who also grew clover seeds as a cash crop. He took care of about 15 beehives which helped with pollination, and Stan was familiar with bees and beekeeping from an early age.

​Honey Bee Queen Laying Eggs, Arizona State University

​In 1998 Stan retired, and he and his wife bought the 55 acres which became Las Parras. There was an old, totally dead cottonwood near the acequia, a “snaggletooth” as Stan called it, which had to be removed. After they cut it down, Stan discovered to his horror that they had cut off the top of a beehive! Luckily, this happened in the winter when it was freezing cold, and the bees had all huddled down in the lower part. Stan built a make-shift roof for the hive and took one of the honeycombs, put it in an ice chest,  brought it back to Cheyenne/Wyoming where he was still working at the time, and extracted the honey.
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“It was absolutely putrid. Who in the heck would eat this stuff?” Stan is a great raconteur, and it was fun listening to his stories.  “I took a little jar of it to a person at the Botanical Garden, he was a beekeeper. ‘Well, these bees have gotten into rabbit brush’, he said, ‘it  makes a really terrible honey. But if you wait six months, it'll clear and it'll be perfect’. I probably didn’t believe him but I gave some to Marsha Mason who lived in the Valley at the time. That spring, she brought it out because she had some guests, and she called me, saying, ‘Stan, it's the most wonderful honey in the world!’.  You gotta be kidding, I thought. I still had some, and I went and looked at it and tasted it. And indeed – it tasted great.  It came from chamisa which is also known as rabbitbrush. When you smell the flower in the fall, it's rank. It has a sweet, sick smell, but then the honey clears and becomes super-tasty”.

​Image credit: Jessica Rath

​So that was Stan’s Abiquiu introduction to beekeeping.  How many hives do you have now? I wanted to know.

“I've got five right now. I had as many as 15 to 18,  prior to two things that have created real problems not only for us beekeepers  here in the valley, but across the nation. One of those is called the Varroa destructor. It's a mite that attaches itself to the adult bees and gets into the hives. There's no way to keep it out”, Stan explained.

I had read about the pests and diseases that can affect adult honey bees. Varroa destructor, or varroa mite, is a parasitic mite that attaches itself to a bee and feeds on it – sucking out its storage of fatty acids, glucose, and other energy sources. Besides weakening the bee, the open wound exposes it to virus infections, which further debilitates the insect, leading to deformed wings.

“It’s called a straw wing. The wing will not unfurl but just looks like a stick of straw. It's also called a K wing, because it looks like the letter K coming off the bee’s body”, Stan explained. “They can't forage, and are of no value to the hive”. He has seen this with his own eyes, and it is devastating.  “Once the Varroa mite is in your area, every hive is going to get infected. There’s no way to keep it out”.
 
Is there anything you can do to help the bees, I asked anxiously.

“Yes,  there are a couple of things that you can do”, Stan assured me. “First, we've learned you can use oxalic acid. It's an organic compound, present in many fruits and vegetables. But the most prominent place to find it is in the leaves of rhubarb. We don't eat the leaves because they are presumably poisonous, they're bad for cows –  that's oxalic acid. So you can get crystals of oxalic acid, and you put it in a little tray which you slide into the hive, attached to a 12 volt battery. You fill the little tray up with a couple of teaspoons of oxalic crystal. And when  heat is applied to it via the 12 volt battery, it sublimates, meaning that it converts from crystals to smoke. It literally becomes smoke inside of the hive. In the wintertime you'll block everything off, and you fill the the hive up with the sublimated oxalic acid,  and the smoke kills the little mites, but it does not affect the honeybees. You'll go in and do this in October, wait three weeks, and treat it a second time”.
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“This will reduce the level of the mites dramatically, and so you get through the winter. This past winter, I had four hives. And all four of them came out strong in the  spring, ready to go”.

​One of Stan’s hives. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

​Stan continued: “The other thing you can do: you can smoke your hive with the bark of juniper, and it has an impact on the mites as well. They'll fall off of the bee. You put some paper underneath the hive and you smoke it for roughly a week. Every evening you pull the paper out and you look at it. When I started doing this years ago, I found tons of them after the first day, and you'd get it down to maybe half a dozen, that’s the impact I made over five days of smoking. It agitates the bees, it doesn't hurt them, but bingo, it sure knocks the mites off”.

There are a number of commercial miticides available, insecticides which kill mites, but Stan doesn’t like to use those chemicals with his bees. He now uses oxalic acid, because it is a naturally occurring product.

But there are other kinds of issues with bees that will take the hive down, Stan told me. There is  American foulbrood and European foulbrood;   bacterial diseases which are so infectious that  some countries require all infected hives and equipment to be destroyed. Then there is chalkbrood disease, which is caused by a fungus. It affects the bee larvae which ingest the spores of the fungus which then look like little pieces of chalk, or tiny mummies. The spores grow mycelia, a tiny network of filaments which steal the nutrients from the baby bee, eventually killing it and forming a hardened mass around it. Luckily it usually isn't a serious disease because it can be prevented with good ventilation and adequate warmth.

And what is colony collapse, I asked Stan.

“It followed right after the mites,” he explained. “What happens here:  you go into the hive in the spring after winter, and there's absolutely not a dead bee around.

There are no bees. Well, where did they go?”

“Earlier, we saw a telltale sign of this symptom: you would find bees on the ground, just out in the field, and they're going around and around in a little circle. They seemed confused, disoriented. And then they don’t find their way back to their hive and die somewhere outside”. How sad, when you consider that every worker bee wants to fulfill her duties: take care of the queen, feed the babies, forage for nectar.

Top left: Bee foraging on a strawberry blossom. Image credit: Jessica Rath

​Stan knows why this happened: “Colony collapse, we think, is due to a pesticide that was developed by Monsanto (now owned by Bayer, one of the largest pharmaceutical and biomedical companies in the world): a neonicotinoid (“neonic”). We think it affects the minds of the baby bees. The bees come out to forage, they're going to eat the nectar. And this product is in the nectar. It's in the pollen that they feed to their little ones, and that's at the time when the cells are dividing rapidly, because they're in a tremendous growth period. This neonic, chemically similar to nicotine, affects them, and as an adult bee, they go in and out, they're foraging, but ultimately, it's like Alzheimer's. They can't find their way home, and there’s no dead bees in the hive  because they died somewhere out there”.

“In Europe, they banned it”, Stan continued, “and in a couple years the bees came back. So that seems to me to be a pretty good indicator for what was creating the colony collapse disorder. The Europeans, country by country banned Monsanto pesticides. Of course, Bayer has taken them to court, but I think the European countries have won so far. But here in the States, it’s not banned. There have been attempts to restrict its use by the EPA, etc, but at this point it's still being used”.

I had to look it up. According to Wikipedia, the Obama administration issued a blanket ban against the use of neonics on National Wildlife Refuges in response to concerns about off-target effects of the pesticide, and a lawsuit from environmental groups. In 2018, the Trump administration reversed this decision, but in May 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked approval for a dozen pesticides containing clothianidin and thiamethoxam as part of a legal settlement. Remember that giant corporations such as Bayer have a powerful lobby.

But Stan has even more to say about the causes for colony collapse and other diseases afflicting our bees.

“Farmers in the United States do a lot of what we call monotype crops: everywhere you look in Indiana for example, you see corn.  Prior to all this, Mother Nature provided a whole plethora of flowers and crops and whatever. The bees got a wide variety and not just one source of nectar; many, many sources of nectar. And so they fed the baby bees pollen along with that, and they got pollen from a whole host of different flowers. I think all of those things played into the health of the bees. So if you look at it from the standpoint of how varied was the source? Prior to
corporate farming it was very, very varied”.

A European honey bee bringing fresh pollen back to the hive. Muhammad Mahdi Karim/GNU FreeDocumentation License

“We're blessed here in the valley, quite frankly, because we don't have that kind of farming. So there's a lot of stuff available to the bees. It's really interesting to watch the bees come in, starting in the spring. They have their little baskets on their hind legs that they use to bring the pollen in. And the pollen that comes in very early in the year is looking very much like an olive green.  It’s a bit hard to see, but if you stand at the entrance to the hive when the bees are coming in, maybe every fifth bee will have pollen on its legs”.
 
“The rest of the bees are bringing either nectar in or water. They use a lot of water, and so they'll bring in water as well, but the color of that pollen changes, and one of the first trees to produce pollen of some kind is the elm. The elm tree is a big one for the olive green color. Juniper, or cedar if you will, is probably the next one, it has a very bright yellow color. So the pollen will change color from a green-grey to a bright yellow. And then it'll change to a blood red. It changes to a blood red, which is from another source of pollen out there. And as the year develops, it turns  pretty much into a yellowy orange color”.

I had no idea – nectar can have almost every color of the rainbow, but that’s lost with monocrop agriculture. Bees should have different sources for pollen throughout the year, but in states such as Iowa they only have one – they only have corn.  We humans change the natural process of things at our own peril, it seems. Besides bees, other insects like moths and butterflies are affected by pesticides. The caterpillar of the Monarch butterfly feeds on the leaves of milkweed which often grows near cultivated fields. The wind carries the neonics over to the milkweed which the Monarch caterpillar eats, with the result that over the last two decades the numbers of Monarchs have declined by about 80%. And it goes on: birds are starving because they can’t find enough insects to eat.

Bee collecting pollen. Public domain.

​​I’m glad Stan took the time for this interview. I learned so much about the threats bees have to face, and how it affects not only food production for humans, but other animals as well. Stan raises his grapes organically and makes sure that his bees are as safe from harm as possible. That’s good to know and  lets me hope that humans won’t destroy life on the planet in the near future.