VANCOUVER—Julia Common had to kill more than a million baby bees last year.

The cool, rainy start to the spring had been hard on her honeybees, but the colonies were strong before they went into the blueberry fields. After a few weeks pollinating though, they hadn’t grown as they should have. They were weak and some of the babies were diseased.

“It’s hugely upsetting to see your bees dying,” Common said.

While bee brood – or larvae – should be “glistening, white, and pearly,” some of hers were “gooey” and “stinky” instead. Testing showed low levels of two common bacterial diseases, but there was something unidentifiable, too.

“Some people call it snotty brood,” she said. “They don’t know what it is but the brood doesn’t look healthy.”











Common, who said she noticed a serious problem with her hives about two to three weeks after the bees left the blueberry fields, isn’t the only beekeeper worried about the health of their colonies.

The president of the BC Honey Producers’ Association, Kerry Clark, said a growing number of beekeepers have reported sick bees after blueberry pollination. They say it’s having an effect down the line on their honey production.

In response, the association is launching a study this spring that should help confirm whether honeybees are actually in worse health after a few weeks in the blueberry fields, and – if so – why.

The results matter for B.C.’s blueberry growers, who produce about 96 per cent of Canada’s highbush blueberries.

The bottom line is that it’s bad for the blueberries if the bees aren’t happy, said Jason Smith, a fourth-generation grower based in the Matsqui region of Abbotsford and a past chair of the BC Blueberry Council.

Blueberries are one of B.C.’s highest value crops and essentially dependent on pollinators. As provincial apiculturist Paul van Westendorp put it, bees are “integral” to the sex life of blueberries.

And, the berries are needy when it comes to pollination. Each flower needs to be visited about 20 times by different bees, explained Mark Winston, a recognized bee expert from Simon Fraser University. Fewer bee visits can lead to puny, misshapen berries, smaller yields and lower profits.

Each year, Smith spends somewhere between $9,000 to $12,000 to rent enough honeybee hives for his crops. Across the province, pollination is costing growers millions of dollars a year.

Smith is interested in what the beekeepers’ study might show.

“Getting good science is important. If there are things that I can do to help or things that the beekeepers can do to help make their bees stronger – if that comes out of this – great,” he said.

Last summer, Common destroyed hundreds of frames of brood comb, which looks like honeycomb but is used to raise young, and put the healthy bees in smaller boxes.

“Bees keep their hive clean,” she said, but when they get sick, it’s harder for them to “keep up with the death and the disease.” Putting them in a smaller box gives them a chance to take back control of their hive.

She struggled after all of that with the decision to put her bees back in the blueberry fields, but ultimately decided she wanted to help figure out what what making them sick and that meant taking some of her bees back to the field. So she’s renting 50 of the 250 colonies she manages as Hives for Humanity’s chief beekeeper to a blueberry farm this spring.

So far, her colonies are “booming.” On a sunny spring day out in Delta Common, she lifted the lid off one of her brightly coloured hives. Puffing a cloud of smoke to calm the bees, she then levered one of the wooden frames loose and pulled it free from the hive. Hundreds of bees buzzed and wriggled on the honeycomb as she checked for fresh brood. She gently brushed some of the bees aside to reveal a capped cell – the pupa inside would emerge a full-grown bee in just a few days.

These hives, and the hives from four other beekeepers, will be included in the honey producers’ study.

On Friday, the study’s field project manager Heather Higo and her team inspected their first set of hives to assess the overall health of the colonies.

Half of the colonies included in the study are receiving a protein supplement to test whether a lack of nutrition from blueberry pollen is a problem.

The researchers are also taking samples of bees and pollen, measuring the adult population and number of larvae, and establishing a baseline of bee health.

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In four weeks, the team will do it all again. Higo hopes they’ll pick up on if the bee populations are declining, there are fewer larvae or they aren’t as healthy.

The earliest preliminary results of the study are expected within three to four months, though some results, including the analysis of pollen samples, will take longer.

While Higo cautioned that reports of bee health issues from blueberry pollination have all been “anecdotal” and there’s “no hard science,” they are taking the concerns of beekeepers seriously and aiming to develop that science through this study, she said.

In the meantime, experts do have some ideas about what intertwining factors could be causing problems for the bees.

Some, like the dreary spring weather, can’t be controlled. But others, including certain agricultural practices, could be shifted with an eye to improving honeybee health and at the same time attracting more wild bees to the fields.

“We’ve learned that it’s not wise to be dependent on only one managed pollinator species,” said Winston, who argued in his 2016 report for Vancity that increasing wild bee populations could help ensure blueberries get the attention they need.

When it comes to blueberry pollination, bumblebees, one of about 450 wild bee species native to B.C., are the best bee for the job because they vibrate.

When the fuzzy buzzers land on a blueberry flower, they shake their whole body to gather pollen – a protein – to take back to their nests. As they move from flower to flower, they spread the pollen between them, pollinating the blueberry plants.

Honeybees, on the other hand, are a much more passive pollinator. But they can be managed in huge numbers so it’s honeybee hives that blueberry growers rent each spring to pollinate their berries in droves.

While bumblebees couldn’t replace honeybee pollination, they could supplement it. Not only are they better pollinators on a bee-to-bee basis, they’re not afraid of the rain or the cold.

Honeybees can be a bit prissy. They don’t like to fly in the cold, wind, or rain. The hardier bumblebees will work when they won’t.

But, wild bumblebee populations aren’t as abundant as they could be around farms and Winston said that’s largely because of conventional agricultural practices that see huge swaths of land covered in a single crop, the use of chemical sprays such as pesticides and fungicides, and a hostility by farmers towards anything that might be considered a weed.

For the bees – both wild and honey – it means they’re largely stuck with one source of food and it’s not a very good one. Blueberry pollen isn’t considered particularly nutritious for them and Common worries that it could be contaminated by the fungicides growers spray.

Some growers, like Smith, are taking steps to try and improve the habitat around their crops to attract more wild bees, such as bumblebees.

Walking along the edge his blueberry fields under the hot, late-afternoon sun on Thursday, Smith pointed to the squat heather plants blooming every few feet. He’s planted other perennials that bloom at different times of year along one side of his field and has plans to spread wildflower seeds collected from his mother in-law’s garden this spring as well. In a few years, he hopes, there will be a plethora of food for the bumblebees along that edge.

It’s all about increasing bee diversity.

“I spend a lot of money on pollination … so if I can encourage wild, essentially free pollination services that’s great,” he said.

As for pesticides, Smith said no grower is out there applying sprays unless they have to and they know not to spray until the honeybees are out of the fields.

“It’s money out of their pocket,” he said.

If there was sound science that showed a certain product was affecting the bees’ ability to do the job growers are paying for they wouldn’t use it, he said.

He said growers will be open to any type of changes that will improve their chances for great pollination. “But there has to be science and it has to make sense,” he said.

He suspects, though, that a major problem is the weather. The weather patterns have changed in recent years and the rainy, cool springs aren’t just rough on bees, they’re tough for growers too.

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