Kirk Tubbs is a beekeeper with a solid footing in the scientific world. His day job is managing the Twin Falls County Pest Abatement Program. He and his family also run Tubbs’ Berry Farm, offering beekeeping classes to the public each spring. “I tell people to think of colony collapse as death by a thousand cuts,” he said. “No one has narrowed it down to just one cause.” However, Tubbs cites varroa mites, which came to these shores about 20 years ago, as a leading contender. “Beekeepers used pesticides to fight the mites, but these pesticides began to build up in the hives’ wax. The mites developed resistance to the pesticides, basically becoming immune to them. When mites go bee to bee, they spread viruses. I tell people just starting out that if you don’t treat for mites, you’ll lose your hive within two years.” A federally certified wildlife biologist who worked as a technician for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 10 years, Tubbs oversees a
“Working with bees is not something you can learn. It is a sense.” Norma Kofoed
Ananda Kriya harvests the honey produced by his River Street hive last summer. Locally made honey is available to purchase at Nourishme, Main Street Market and Atkinsons’ Markets in the Wood River Valley.
mosquito and black fly control program in Twin Falls, using natural, biologically based products rather than pesticides and other chemicals. He also uses primarily naturally based treatments for mites, including thyme oil, which irritates the mites until they fall off the bees. He sprinkles powdered sugar to clog the mites’ feet, also causing them to drop off the bees. Tubbs said some beekeepers are selecting for naturally occurring “hygienic behaviors” in worker bees. “Some bees will sniff out diseased bees and get rid of them before they hatch. It’s an exciting thing and it’s working. Someone with a handful of hives will do a lot of experimenting.” VeeBee Honey in Buhl began in 2003 with 50 hives and today boasts more than 1,000. Kofoed, who owns the operation with her son Scott VanDerwalker, said it “got hit pretty hard” three or four years ago and lost about 40 percent of its bees to colony collapse disorder. 22
Along with citing the varroa mites, Kofoed has her own theories as to the reasons for the collapse, including feeding the bees highfructose corn syrup in winter from genetically modified corn seeds. Some GMO seeds have been modified to resist the corn borer, and the modification could be passed on to bee colonies during pollination. Kofoed has used antibiotic powders mixed with powdered sugar to treat Nosema apis, a small, unicellular parasite recently reclassified as a fungus that causes diarrhea in honeybees. She has also used menthol to treat microscopic tracheal mites. Since colony collapse nearly destroyed the business a few years ago, VanDerwalker has created hundreds of new colonies by making his own “nukes”—nuclei of bee broods from active hives. Kofoed explained that male drones know how to make a queen on their own. They feed some of the female larvae a glandular secretion called royal jelly, which
causes queens to be conceived. If a good queen bee prospect is born, the drones kill the rest of the competition. “Royal jelly must be pretty powerful stuff, as it turns a regular worker bee into a queen bee,” she said. It was a lot of work to rebuild the lost hives, but by last summer VeeBee Honey had more hives than before colony collapse disorder struck. “I’m very optimistic about bees,” Tubbs concluded. “Mysterious bee deaths are nothing new. You can read about them in bee journals from a hundred years ago. But people back then were probably dealing with different causes than we are now.” The national attention that the plight of the bee has attracted has shined a light on the importance of small-scale beekeepers, which in turn has opened consumers’ eyes to the benefits of local, raw honey. Whatever a bee ingests winds up in its honey. Bees collect nectar from flowers up to six miles away from habitat 2013 • sun valley guide