Hi-Line Living: Bringing balance with bees

Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for humans - food that never spoils.

This factoid, among others - honey is the only food that includes all the substances needed to sustain life - is commonly cited by beekeepers.

Beekeepers, large and small, are a passionate bunch. Clay Vincent, who has had bees for about four years, is one such ardent Havre-area beekeeper.

Vincent is the city sanitarian and, admittedly, a former advocate of a city ordinance to prohibit people from having bees in the city. That all changed when he was challenged, he said, by a woman - a beekeeper - who walked into his office and educated him on the differences between the varieties of stinging insects.

"She said, 'You don't understand them,' which I didn't," Vincent said

Vincent said he learned the difference between honeybees and their aggressive cousins, wasps and hornets, the insects people generally associate with being a nuisance. Wasps and yellow jackets, Vincent said, eat protein, one of the reasons they are aggressive against humans.

Honeybees, on the other hand, are only aggressive with people who get near their hive and threaten their winter honey storage, he said. He has been surrounded by his bees many times and has never had any problems, he said.

Vincent stopped advocating the anti-bee policy, which he learned was never a policy in the first place, he said.

He also went a step further. Vincent became the proud owner of thousands of bees. Now he speaks at length about the interesting attributes of honeybees and, what's more, about those facts that explain why bees are important.

Bees are crucial to bringing balance to an ecosystem that has largely been depleted of its natural pollinators, Vincent said.

"In this office, I have heard a lot of people complaining that they don't have any pollinators in their gardens," he said. "We don't have the natural ecosystem that is needed to maintain our community."

Near one of his hives, on Bullhook Drive, live two very thankful gardeners - Stu McIntosh and Bob Doney. Each of them grows a large garden, and they have each talked about how grateful they are for Vincent's bees, which fly over and pollinate their corn, squash, raspberries and many other crops.

Because honeybees are responsible for about 80 percent of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops in the U.S., more bees are needed, and things need to change, Vincent said. Vincent and others involved in beekeeping expressed concern for the dissipating bee population and the need to remedy that.

"Everything needs to be balanced in the environment," Vincent said. "We've lost 80 percent of our pollinators across the world because of different reasons."

Most of those reasons, he said, likely have something to do with the herbicides and insecticides sprayed on crops. Crops such as alfalfa and sweetclover are what bees pollinate, and therefore, use to produce honey.

Flowers and other blossoming plants have nectarines that produce sugary nectar. Worker bees suck up the nectar and water and store it in a special honey stomach. When the stomach is full the bee returns to the hive and puts the nectar in an empty honeycomb. Natural chemicals from the bee's head glands and the evaporation of the water from the nectar change the nectar into honey.

Some theories suggest the sprays used on crops have played a complicated but damaging role in the bee population. Other sprays intended to kill insects like mosquitos might not be doing the bees any good either, Vincent added.

"If you're trying to kill one bug but you're not going to kill another bug - that's a difficult situation to figure out," he said.

Sue Pollington - the beekeeper who educated and sparked Vincent's bee conversion that day in his office - is not as reserved when it comes to talking about what's causing the bees to disappear.

If things don't radically change - a ban on pesticides and herbicides for starters - Pollington said, the world is in big trouble.

"Unless we do something drastic, we're going to see the death of bees in my lifetime," Pollington said. "The last bee dies, we have four years to live."

Pollington said having bees is essential and practical.

"It makes sense for me to support things that keep me alive," she said.

Like humans depend on trees for air, and water for life, there is no food without bees, she said. She scoffed at the thought of people who think "nano science" will eliminate the need for bee pollination.

Pollington said she has had bees since 2013. She moved from Great Falls, along with her bees, in 2015.

As far as she is concerned, everyone should have bees, she said. In some towns and cities, she said, people put hives on public buildings and near their homes and that's the kind of thinking that is needed in Havre and the surrounding areas.

In addition to the pollination factor, there's the frosting on the cake - the honey.

"My honey is like crack," Pollington said. "It never crystallizes. It has aged correctly."

Wade and Carla Anderson, together with partners Leonard and Vicki Brown, own Bears Paw Apiaries in Chinook, which makes Pollington's honey production look like a drop in a jar. BPA produces hundreds of pounds of honey a year that for mass consumption. Exactly how much honey is produced in a year depends on factors not unlike those that affect farmers.

The family business started in Wolf Point in the 1950s with Wade's father, who started working with a local honey producer after traveling through on his way from Canada to the southwest, Wade Anderson said. Since those humble beginnings, the family apiary has moved to Chinook and the honey business has been taken over by Wade's and his sister's family - and it has bloomed exponentially. One clear sign is the size of the facility, which has been added onto.

The factory-size facility has loading docks where semi trucks back up and load honey and, depending on the season, bees to be transported.

Hanging on both walls of one of the facility's corridors are large boards with the names of more than 200 people who house the Anderson's bees on their property during the floral season. The bee hive are everywhere from Saco to Kalispell, with most hives concentrated on lands in between, many of them in Havre.

The people who own the land where the Andersons' bee hives located are paid in honey and pollination - they get crops like alfalfa and sweet clover pollinated for the floral months, Carla Anderson said.

By mid-July, BPA workers begin collecting honey and bringing it back to the facility. Once at the facility, honeycombs is put in a heat room, where it is heated to between 90 and 95 degrees for three days. This softens the honey, making it easier to take off the frames. Afterward the honey is extracted via an assembly line-like process that enlists between five and six people. Once extracted, the raw honey ends up in one of multiple nine-drum tanks, the last place before it is put in containers and shipped.

As commercial beekeepers, the Andersons get the most out of their honeybees.

In the early months of the year, they ship them to California to pollinate almonds. Then the bees are transported to Washington state to pollinate apples. Around March, they come back to Montana and start the whole process again.

Like his father did with Wade, the Andersons have enlisted their sons, Cord and Winston, into the family business. And like their parents, Cord and Winston tout the benefits of honey.

"Honey's the only natural food that won't spoil," Cord said.

Winston recalled times when people bought raw honey to help with allergies. Many of those people came back and said the honey helped, Winston said.

While honey production has waned in the last couple of decades, experts in the industry say consumption has not.

Rob Buhmann is the chairman of the Sioux Honey Association, the large co-operative that Bear Paw Apiaries is part of. The co-op also makes many products that sell worldwide under the Sue Bee label.

People have become more health conscious, Buhmann said, a large reason why honey consumption is up. Aside from honey being used as substitutes for tea and coffee sweeteners, people want products without high fructose syrup, so use honey instead. The energy bar is one example of the many products that uses honey, Buhmann said.

While Americans consume about 400 million pounds of honey a year, only 170 million pounds is produced in the U.S., Buhmann said.

Like Pollington, Vincent and Wade Anderson, Buhmann cites pesticides as a probable reason for a disintegrating honeybee population. All four mentioned the bee-disappearing phenomenon, colony collapse disorder. CCD occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, plenty of food and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees and the queen, sources say.

"In the six years leading up to 2013, more than 10 million beehives were lost, often to CCD, nearly twice the normal rate of loss," a statement cited in Wikipedia says.

Several reasons for the phenomenon have been proposed, the most popular one blaming the family of pesticides called neonicotinoids as having been the cause. But no cause has been accepted by experts as a whole.

Mites are another bee killer. Buhmann said the varroa mite, which migrated from southern and central America sometime in the '80s and started significantly affecting honeybee population in the '90s.

Whatever the reason for the disappearing of the honeybee, one thing everyone agreed on is that it's time to become more conscious of honeybees.