WMU junior Shaana Way peers over a hive buzzing with thousands of bees.
“If I could eat like a bee all the time, I’d be in heaven. They’ve got the best diets ever—sugar.” —Caitlin Minzey
having helped establish this apiary last year with an $11,000 allocation from WMU’s Student Sustainability Grant Fund.
The students have been learning how to create and maintain hives to raise awareness and study the ecological significance of the honeybee. Eventually the goal is to use the apiary to conduct research.
Every third mouthful In the United States, managed honeybee colonies have been declining over the past several decades, from more than five million such colonies in the 1940s to half that today.
The initial work of this group, WMU Students for a Sustainable Earth, has been to develop a self-perpetuating cadre of student beekeepers to care for the bees, with the most experienced keepers teaching newbies who join the apiculture project.
One of the specific blows to honeybees in the past 10 years— colony collapse disorder—is a mysterious occurrence in which a majority of the bees in a colony abruptly depart and never return. Scientists have not pinned down a cause, but many suggest there’s probably not a single cause, rather a synergistic effect from multiple stresses.
Big picture, these environmentally conscious students are concerned about the plight of the honeybee, an important but imperiled pollinator threatened by a variety of culprits, including habitat loss, pesticides and the puzzling phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.
The downturn in honeybees is significant because roughly one third of the food Americans consume—some $15 billion worth of annual agricultural production—directly or indirectly benefits from honeybee pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. WMU Apiary
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