It’s been a difficult year for the Honey House in Dubois. That’s because the bee farm that supports the store, located in Crowheart, Wyoming, lost 67% of its colonies this year.
The loss was part of a wave of unusually large-scale honeybee losses throughout the Rocky Mountain and Midwest regions.
Honey House owner Kyle Miller said his losses weren’t even as bad as some he’s heard about.
“I know a guy in North Dakota who lost like 15,000 hives,” Miller said. “It was like a $4 million loss. I don’t even know what they’re going to do to come out of that. He had 20,000 hives and, all of a sudden, he had just 1,000 left.”
The losses hit many honeybee operations in a broad swath that stretched from the Midwest to California, Miller said.
“Even, like, California for pollination contracts, they were 200,000 to 300,000 hives short for pollinating crops,” he said. “They just didn’t have the hives.”
Miller usually sends a couple of semi-loads of bees to California, but had to ship one whole truck home early, because the bee populations in that truck dropped too low to get a paying contract.
“My friends in Worland who also had bees in Riverton lost 6,000 hives,” Miller said. “They’re struggling to get their numbers back this spring too.”
Miller has spent the last two months focused on rebuilding his hives ahead of honey flow, that point where there’s enough golden sweet honey to take some of it away from the bees for commercial purposes.
Miller needs a plentiful amount of surplus honey to make the many retail products stocked at the Honey House in Dubois.
“It’s crazy and so, so disheartening when you work your butt off to get those numbers up and get them healthy and then to watch it drop like that,” Miller said. “You put all your heart and soul into it, and it’s pretty rough. But we busted our ass this spring and we’re back, close to 1,200 again, and the bees look really good.”
A warmer than usual spring helped Miller rebuild his hives, he believes.
“It was a really good dandelion year,” he said. “So, the hot spring kind of got the queens laying early, and the population is looking pretty good now, so. Hopefully they’ll have good honey flow here soon.”
Honeybee operations in Wyoming have been scrambling to get ready for the honey to flow with unusually large colony losses earlier this year. The Honey House in Dubois says it’s ready — just barely — for a new tourism season. (Courtesy Honey House) 
Honeybee operations in Wyoming have been scrambling to get ready for the honey to flow with unusually large colony losses earlier this year. The Honey House in Dubois says it’s ready — just barely — for a new tourism season. (Courtesy Honey House) 
Honeybee operations in Wyoming have been scrambling to get ready for the honey to flow with unusually large colony losses earlier this year. The Honey House in Dubois says it’s ready — just barely — for a new tourism season. (Courtesy Honey House)
Changing Weather
Michael Jordan of Cheyenne was one of the beekeepers who said he didn’t have as many problems this year as other growers had.
He believes that changing weather has played a big role in bee losses this year.
“During February, we had weather conditions that were extremely warm for long periods of time,” he said. “You had to feed the bees a lot, you had to go in and inspect the bees, because you have to go in and do mite control.”
Warmer than usual weather followed by cold snaps made things much harder for beekeepers than usual, Jordan said.
“They’d be starving, and then, all of a sudden the next day, it was 30 degrees, so they would freeze and die,” he said.
Jordan, whose bees are part of a large commercial operation, doesn’t typically have to contend with those kinds of problems, and that’s one reason his losses were only in the 6 to 13% range.
Jordan’s bees, as part of a larger corporate company, head to Idaho for the winter, where they’re stored in a bee container and maintained at a constant temperature between 38 to 42 degrees.
“They store up to 2,000, 3,000 beehives in one container,” Jordan said. “And they have three or four containers where they just put all these beehives in. That way they can control their environment throughout the season, all the way from November to January.”
After that, the bees are moved out to almond fields in California.
“The whole unit is fumigated for mites,” Jordan added. “Instead of people going in and individually doing their hives, they just fumigate the whole building, doing 2,500 hives in one shot.”
Miller, on the other hand, believes part of his problems were related to drought in the fall, which meant his bees didn’t have the best sources of pollen headed into the winter.
“You try to give them a pollen substitute after the honey flow, just to give them some more nutrition,” Miller said. “And that usually works pretty good. Like we do that every year, but there are some new viruses and some new pesticides out that nobody knows about and there’s a new varroa mite that people are dealing with. So, I think it’s kind of mixture of a whole bunch of (stuff) together.”
Those Resistant Mites
Resistant Varroa destructor mites may have helped drive some of the unusually large colony collapses this year, according to research by the USDA that was released earlier in June.
That study, which is available online, analyzed samples from six major commercial beekeeping operations, which collectively managed nearly 184,000 colonies, or about 7% of all U.S. Hives.
Those operations reported losses averaging over 60%, just as bees were staging for the almond pollination season in California.
Researchers identified high levels of Deformed Wing Virus, both A and B, and Acute Bee paralysis Virus, and further confirmed the diagnosis with experimental inoculation.
Many of the mites collected from those colonies tested positive for a genetic marker linked to resistance to amitraz, which is a commonly used miticide for commercial beekeepers.
The president of the American Beekeeping Federation, Patty Sundberg, called that a critical finding in a media statement.
“We can’t continue relying on a single line of defense against Varroa,” she said. “These mites are evolving quickly, and our management tools must evolve just as fast. We also need to find treatments for these viruses, and we await the release of how pesticide exposure and poor nutrition amplify the impact from these viruses.”
American Honey Producers Association President Steven Coy agreed with Sundberg’s assessment.
“The findings released this week are a crucial first step in providing beekeepers actionable information,” he said in a media statement. “It highlights the necessity for additional miticides and methods of controlling Varroa and the associated viruses.”
He urged USDA to provide further results from the study, related to other stressors, like nutritional, chemical, and environmental stresses as soon as possible.
“Beekeepers need a complete picture of what happened to make sound decision regarding the health of our colonies,” he said.
The Honey Bee Health Coalition has released a guide to Varroa mite controls to address the risk of amitraz resistance. The group plans to update their guide sometime late this year.
Honeybee operations in Wyoming have been scrambling to get ready for the honey to flow with unusually large colony losses earlier this year. The Honey House in Dubois says it’s ready — just barely — for a new tourism season. (Courtesy Honey House) 
Honeybee operations in Wyoming have been scrambling to get ready for the honey to flow with unusually large colony losses earlier this year. The Honey House in Dubois says it’s ready — just barely — for a new tourism season. (Courtesy Honey House) 
Honeybee operations in Wyoming have been scrambling to get ready for the honey to flow with unusually large colony losses earlier this year. The Honey House in Dubois says it’s ready — just barely — for a new tourism season. (Courtesy Honey House)
Bees Face A Rapidly Changing World
As a commercial operation, Miller does things a bit differently. While most commercial operations tend to focus on honey contracts for the guaranteed money, his business model is a blend that leans heavily on direct-to-consumer sales.
He got the idea from his travels in New Zealand, where he found a Honey House with all sorts of handcrafted honey products.
Given that his family already had a honey operation, the experience from that Honey House really stuck with him, and, when he returned home to Dubois to help his dad keep the honey farm going, it was one of the ideas he brought with him.
Bees are popular, he feels, and people are very interested in knowing more about them. That’s helping turn his honey house into a tourism destination.
“People are realizing how important bees are,” he said. “So, they’re not spraying as much, and there’s kind of an education in what they do for the world. It’s so nice that people are acknowledging that.”
The world has changed a lot for bees since Miller’s grandfather started keeping bees in the 40s, Miller added.
“Back then the irrigation was flood irrigation,” he said. “They wanted the alfalfa to bloom a little more, and they didn’t have equipment to cut it quite so fast.”
That gave bees a longer timeframe to collect the pollen they need to remain healthy.
“Now they have these tractors that can cut a field within minutes, compared to days,” Miller said. “And it’s not flood irrigation, it’s a lot of these sprinklers. So only one little area is getting watered and then everything else is dried up. So, I think that cuts off a huge amount from the 80s until now.”
Miller estimates it’s dropped honey production potential in half for his area.
“It takes like a million blossoms to make a pound of honey,” Miller said.
And it takes 72 million bees to go out and collect from those millions of blooms.
Having the bees behind the Honey House in Dubois has made it a popular business with tourists, Miller added, but relying on honey flow does introduce some risk.
“Honey flow is so up in the air,” Miller said. “It depends on weather, and the way people irrigate, if you’re going to have honey flow or not. So, it’s kind of a gamble.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
