Alaska beekeepers work to preserve hives

By JEANNETTE J. LEE

ANCHORAGE, Alaska

Honeybees aren't built to survive subzero temperatures, but that hasn't stopped beekeepers trying to nurture the fuzzy insects through Alaska's most notorious season.

With a shortage of bees nationwide, the price of importing fresh bees to Alaska from farms to the south has risen steadily in the past several years, prompting the push to keep them alive in The Last Frontier.

Most beekeepers in Alaska kill their colonies with chemicals or soapy water after the brief summer honey harvest because keeping them alive through the winter is so difficult. Come spring, they send away for fresh bees from northern California, where many large-scale commercial beekeepers are based.

"It's usually more economical for people to get new bees, but the cost of bees and queens are going up every year," said Dick Allen, a retired helicopter engineer who kept tens of thousands of bees in 11 hives this summer in his suburban backyard.

Allen is typical of the hundreds of hobbyists who make up the bulk of beekeepers in Alaska. Honey, pollen and slabs of beeswax placed in neat rows on his kitchen counter await the odd customer lucky enough to spot the "Honey for Sale" sign planted on his residential street. Allen never expects to make a profit.

In comparison, commercial beekeepers in the U.S. typically tend to 2,000 to 4,000 hives, with some managing up to 20,000 hives, said Marla Spivak, an entomology professor at the University of Minnesota.

But various studies have shown the wild and domestic honeybee populations have declined dramatically in the past few decades, largely because two species of bloodsucking mites have proven impossible to eradicate.

In 2005, honeybees had to be imported from outside North America for the first time since 1922, according to a report released in October by the National Research Council.

"It's a bad situation and it's not getting better," said John Foster, a second-generation bee farmer who runs 12,000 hives in Esparto, Calif., 30 miles west of Sacramento. "The mites are a constant battle. It's taking so much more money to run these bees than it used to."

The higher prices have beekeepers experimenting with various containers and insulating materials to protect bees through the cold months.

Steve Victors imports millions of bees from Foster each spring for hundreds of beekeepers in south-central Alaska. California agricultural officials inspect Foster's colonies for mites before they leave the state, but the pests always manage to hitch a ride.

"We're bringing up 9 million bees, so there's always going to be a few mites," Victors said.

When Allen started beekeeping 10 years ago, a 4-pound package of bees cost $55. This year, that's about the price of a 3-pound package. Farmed honeybee stocks in the United States have declined by 39 percent since the arrival of the exotic mites in the 1980s, according to the new report from the National Academies.

Victors said he is trying to keep 80 of his 100 colonies alive through the winter for the first time, despite the fact that the bees spend all their time clustered together for warmth and produce no honey.

He moved his hives into a refrigerated container used originally to transport fruits and vegetables. Fans and thermostats hold the temperature at precisely 40 degrees. When hives get too warm the bees will try to leave the hive to pass waste. If it's too cold they refuse to break from their cluster, not even to retrieve honey or sugar syrup stored in hexagonal niches just inches away. They don't so much freeze as starve to death.

Many of the techniques used to over-winter bees come from Canada, according to Spivak. In the mid-1980s, a ban on importing American bees forced Canadian beekeepers to invent ways to keep the colonies alive through the cold months.

Victors, for instance, is modeling his winter set-up on that of a beekeeper in Ontario who he said has reported winter survival rates of 98 percent.

Alaska beekeepers face a paradox in prolonging the life of a hive in winter: Bees that are cooped up for the winter succumb more easily to the mites and tend to be weaker than packaged bees that have been busy gathering nectar in warmer climes.

Some say hive preservation is an art that goes beyond economics. They feel it's a duty and a welcome challenge to help the bees survive.

"It's so easy to get bee packets," said Allen. "To my thinking, it's called 'beekeeping.' You keep the bees."

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On the Net:

American Beekeeping Federation: http://www.abfnet.org