By Dan Rahn
University of Georgia
Honeybees can’t seem to catch a break in Georgia. While this
year’s frequent rains have brought welcome relief for people and
most of the state’s plants and animals, it’s just another tough
year for the bees.
“It’s been a bad year for honey production in Georgia,” said
Keith Delaplane, an entomology professor with the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
The main culprit, Delaplane said, is an excessively wet year
coming on the heels of more than four straight years of
drought.
“When there’s too much rain, there’s too much dilution of the
nectar,” he explained. Honeybees convert the nectar they extract
from flowers into honey.
Sweet harvest
The honeybee hive survives over the winter on the rich energy
reserves stored in the honey. Humans harvest the surplus honey,
when there is a surplus, as a sweet crop that eventually ends up
on your breakfast table.
When there isn’t enough rain, Delaplane said, the lack of water
hinders the buildup of sugars in plants.
So for honeybees, this year’s “monsoon season” in Georgia has
had
the same net effect as the previous years of dusty drought: not
enough sugar to make the honey they need.
As if that weren’t enough, all the rains have led to another
serious problem for honeybees: mosquitoes.
Mosquito woes
No, mosquitoes don’t bite bees. But they bite people, and
sometimes they transmit diseases when they do, like West Nile
virus, eastern equine encephalitis and others.
When mosquito numbers are high, as they have been at times this
year, people tend to use more insecticide sprays to reduce the
risk of these potentially deadly diseases.
And the No. 1 pesticide used to control mosquitoes, malathion,
is
deadly to honeybees. “It’s very bad on honeybees if it gets onto
the plants they’re foraging on,” Delaplane said, “or if it’s
sprayed directly onto them.”
The ultra-low-volume sprays used in most urban areas, he said,
lessen the damage to honeybee populations. But malathion in any
form is hardly helpful to the bees, adding insult to the injury
brought on by the quirky weather.
(Dan Rahn is a news editor with the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
