OPB News

Scientists Working To Shore-Up Honeybee Population
By Kristian Foden-Vencil

ALBANY, OR (2007-06-26) You may have heard that the nation's honeybees are in trouble. Their numbers have declined by about a quarter in just the last year alone. Worst of all, nobody knows why. It's not just an environmental problem, either. Those bees pollinate the nation's crops -- meaning farmers are having trouble growing apples, berries, and other insect-pollinated produce. In response, scientists and the federal government are trying to come up with ways to encourage more bees and other pollinators to thrive. Kristian Foden-Vencil visited one Willamette Valley experiment Tuesday, run by the US Department of Agriculture.

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(Sounds of bees in the field.)

On a small rectangular patch of farmland between Corvallis and Albany, the USDA has row upon row of experimental plots.

Mace Vaughan, of the Xerxes Society for Invertebrate Conservation, waves a large white butterfly net over a swath of yellow Oregon Sunshine flowers.

Mace Vaughan: "We're swinging our nets here to collect some of the bees here visiting these flowers. The nice thing about working with bees is you've got this beautiful place to come visit these flowers and there are these insects, black and yellow. "

Kristian Foden-Vencil: "It really is stunning. I'm surprised you're not wearing a beekeepers net."

Mace Vaughan: "Well, this is where bees get a bad name. The only place you need to worry about getting stung is at the nest. And that's only at the big social species' hives, like honey bees. But if you're at the flower there's nothing for them to defend, all they really want to do is get away. "

These flowers are just one of about a hundred different species that scientists have planted here. The idea is to study which native plants bees really like and when those plants flower.

Right now, at the end of June, Vaughan says the Oregon Sunshine is proving to be a big draw.

Mace Vaughan: "From here we might move into the vinegar weeds and the tar weeds. Later in the season there's gum plants and then later than that are the asters and the goldenrod. These are all our late season plants, and they're kind of the tough ones."

What he means, is that they survive Oregon's dry summer and yet still flower, providing bees something to eat throughout their short lives.

Vaughn says that as agriculture has become more mechanized, less and less land has been available for bees and other native species.

Mace Vaughan: "In the 1970s when Earl Butts, the secretary of Agriculture, took office, the standard idea was there, we farm fence row
to fence row. All you've got in your field is your crop, that's it, there's no weeds, no sides, no hedgerow -- it's just fence row to fence row farming. So up until that point there'd been quite a bit of diversity and people had a lot of habitat. And farmers were being told take those things out. Well now, we're turning the tables on them. And so now we're saying that these edges and these field rows, even these weeds actually provide great benefit. They can provide food for these insects."

Vaughan says farmers are understandably a little weary of all the advice they get.

Mace Vaughan: It's pretty funny to talk to them, because they can be pretty frustrated."

The field of Oregon Sunshine we're standing in serves a dual purpose. Scientists can figure out when exactly the plant flowers and which pollinators it attracts.

Joe Williams, with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, says they're getting the same kind of information on about a hundred other native species on the farm. He expects that by this time next year, they'll be able to give farmers, cities, and other land owners a solid practical explanation about which mixture of flowers can make their land "pollinator friendly."

Joe Williams: "What we're trying to do is to raise more awareness of the importance of pollinators in our society."

With that in mind -- and in view of the fact that it's National Pollinator Week -- Williams has been running a workshop. More than a dozen people, from city groundskeepers to large federal land managers, turned up to learn how to make Oregon more bee friendly.

At the same time, nine US Senators, including California's Barabara Boxer, have introduced the Pollinator Protection Act to provide more money for such experiments in the future.