Friendly Victory on Honeybees - as both sides Win and then join Together

This report is preliminary. But the news seems too good not to share.

Underwriters Labs honeybee hives, which had posed so serious a threat to the health of the two Somme Nature Preserves, will be removed.

Equally importantly, this eco-triumph was achieved in peace and with all sides joining together in agreement to improve the health and sustainability of the Somme preserves by promoting habitat extensions of quality vegetation on Underwriters' large adjacent campus. 

Photos fail to do justice to the ecosystem. It's easy to see the flowers but miss the diverse pollinators on which whole rare communities depend. When you're in the ecosystem, this scene moves and hums. See video, below. 

Crucial to understanding flowers: If robust pollinator populations are lost, the ecosystem starts to lose plant species.

We'll tell this story in more detail once the dust has settled and we have more specifics. But for now the main point is that high-level agency-to-agency contacts for years had not worked. On-the-ground folks made the difference. It started when volunteer Dan Delaney organized an Advocacy Team to tackle half a dozen Somme problems. The team went to work. Somme volunteer Ali Fakhari remembered mention of a way to contact bee-keepers if insecticide spraying might damage a hive. He searched the Internet and found the link and passed to Dan the contact info for the Underwriters bees (who for now will just be Michael). Recently retired from an advertising and tech career, Dan is a communicator. His letter was so wise and positive that it amazes us to this day. Some highlights are quoted below:

Hi Michael,  

I am writing as a member of the Friends of Northbrook Forest Preserves ...

We probably share a common interest in conservation with you and the other folks at UL involved with the beehives.

I’m writing to seek your guidance regarding a situation we’ve discovered.

Our work includes helping to sustain populations of rare plants and animals. Two of these are the federally endangered Rusty Patch Bumble Bee and the Southern Plains Bumblebee ...

An unintended consequence of UL’s admirable efforts to support pollinators ...

Both of our communities have the same goal of restoring and supporting Mother Nature. We have some ideas on how we can work together to address this situation. 

Best, 

A friendly and thoughtful phone conversation followed. Michael said he was authorized to say that the bee hives would be removed, and he an colleagues were interested in cooperating to restore pollinator habitat on the Underwriters campus.

We hope to publish the whole letter (and more on next steps with the good Underwriters folks) later.

The video below may help convey why this is so important. Although you need a big screen and slo-mo for it to be at all clear, here's what's there: two bumble bees and a few other small native bees compete with twenty to thirty (it's hard to count) honeybees. Most of the pollen and nectar is leaving the ecosystem. The rare native pollinators may not get enough to sustain their populations, especially given the small numbers of some species (and the plants they depend on) and many other stresses these days. Population extinctions are the opposite of what the Nature Preserves System is about. 

For more detail on the eco-issues, see the original May 24th post, Honeybee Hives Threaten Rare Bumblebees At Somme.

For a good summary of honeybee issues from the Xerces Society, click here.

For this story told as a fable, click here. 

For a YouTube video showing the pollinators at Somme, click here. 

Endnote on the YouTube video: The birds you hear singing most obviously in the background include song sparrow, goldfinch, and blue jay. Other birds regularly found in this part of this savanna include orchard oriole, bluebird, kingbird, flicker, indigo bunting, yellowthroat, kestrel, red-tailed hawk, and hummingbird. The main flowers drawing the pollinators here are white and purple prairie clovers. Other herbs shown include wild quinine, rattlesnake master, rosinweed, Junegrass, dropseed, and big bluestem grasses. 

Endnote: Some responses to the video on Facebook

Kim M. Heise

Oh my God, you mean that the bees we have been trying to encourage, are actually HURTING the environment? What the hell!!

 

Linda Valdez Karl

Kim M. Heise honeybees don't need protection. Native bees do.

Frank P Lawrence

Kim M. Heise Honeybees are invasive species . Most of our native bees are solitary pollinators and can't compete for nectar and pollen from swarms of Honeybees .

Kim M. Heise

I’m afraid I can’t believe that. It looks to me like there seems to be plenty for all! So beekeepers are the “bad guys” now? Not buying it.

 

Linda Valdez Karl

Kim M. Heise Honeybees are also generalist pollinators and can travel a mile to find pollen. The range of native bees is much smaller and some native bees have evolved with a specific native plant.

 

Chris Pado

Kim M. Heise please do some research on the subject. Honeybees are non-native farmed insects that spread disease and outcompete our native pollinators. There was never any reason to 'save' them despite the hype.

 

Alan Wade

Kim M. Heise , I do not know personally anyone who is trying to encourage non native honorees. Those who are doing so are misguided and not following or not willing to understand the science.

 

Kim M. Heise

Despite that being true, we have been told that bees are essential to our agriculture and that we would starve without them. And yes, in Missouri, the Department of Conservation frequently prints articles telling people how to attract honeybees and other pollinators. And I don’t think there is a single garden club in this country that doesn’t preach the same thing.

 

Stephen Packard

Kim, yes. Honeybees are now essential for pollinating many commercial crops. But they’re one species with increasingly severe disease problems. In they were to crash, we humans would be in serious trouble. In most non-commercial situations, diverse native bees would do all the needed pollination with only a small part of the support now given to honeybee hives. Indeed, that was long true, before we wiped out hedgerows etc. Saving wild pollinators is important to the future. Wild honeybees are said never to be so numerous as to create the problems that farmed bees create. It would be wise for gardeners and ecosystem conservationists to study pollinators side by side with their interdependent plants. 

 

Chris Pado

Kim M. Heise, which is all misguided. Honeybees are specifically bred for agriculture so there is no need to protect them or for hobbyists to raise them. They are also inferior pollinators for many crops.

 

Kim M. Heise

They are not “invasive” in the classical sense, they were deliberately imported to do a job.

 

MA Enri

Kim M. Heise what is not mentioned above is IF the honey bee hives are placed anywhere near protected nature preserves that the non native honey bees are going into those spaces and stealing all the valuable resources of protected native bee species. Some of which are really quite rare now due to habitat loss.

We need our native bees. In the area in question, hives have been placed close to such a rare, protected ecosystem, and this is just plain wrong. The honey bees are naturally going to go into this large preserve because of the wealth of varied species on hundreds of acres.

This is not an agricultural area. This is an Illinois Nature Preserve with rare and valuable species. It seems as if someone placed hives close to the fence in order to take advantage of getting themselves some free honey. They set up hives on corporate property next to a nature preserve. These honey bees have a devastating impact on an ecosystem for native bees.

 

Frank P Lawrence

Kim M. Heise so was Buckthorn, Bush Honeysuckle and Bradford pear – brought here for a purpose. Our European ancestors brought all sorts of organisms here because they didn't know better . The thing is, our native pollinators are more than capable of pollinating any and all crops regardless of where they originated from.

Angella Moorehouse
Could have used this support back in 2015-16 when INPC was voting to allow hives on 2 nature preserve buffers.

Chris Matson
Great message because the honey folks are good people but they don’t understand how to compartmentalize their activities to ag landscapes and respect the missions of imperiled natural lands and the declining native Hymenopterans that rely on them.

David J. Zaber
Honeybees are not native. Homewood Izaak Walton Preserve has experienced an insect diversity and abundance collapse, along with the rest of our region.

Josh Habib
Huh didn’t know that.

Ann S Manalo ·
Amazing

Mary Ann Crayton
This is well documented all over the US.

Lesley Lucas
In Florida, where Chinese Tallow is an invasive tree rapidly displacing native plant species, beekeepers insist on planting them because they grow fast and produce huge number of flowers. The beekeeping industry is a billion $ behemoth.

Linda DueverMockernut Hill Botanical Garden

 

This is why we don't have honeybees at Mockernut Hill Botanical Garden -- and greatly appreciate our neighbors who help us nurture the native bees by not keeping hives! It's the wild native bees that are endangered, not the honeybees, which are basically just straying domestic livestock.