Bee Good to Your Neighbor

To the casual observer the idea that farmers and beekeepers should want to cooperate seems obvious. Crops need healthy pollinators and bees need swaths of pollen, so each party should coordinate to ensure the healthy existence of the other. Right? Except it's not that simple.

In places like California, where fruit and nut orchards require the presence of bee colonies, everyone—both farmer and beekeeper—is invested in sustaining healthy population of honeybees. There is particular urgency these days in the face of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which bee colonies fail due to the disappearance of worker bees, leaving the queen, immature bees, and a few nurse bees to fend for themselves. It is hypothesized that CCD is a result of a combination of threats that includes mites and beetle infestations, infections, poor nutrition, and pesticides. So when knowable threats to local bee populations—like pesticide applications—are planned, beekeepers are informed so hives can be moved or otherwise protected.

In Louisiana, however, the urgency of the concern is alleviated by the fact that, as LSU AgCenter entomologist Sebe Brown explained, most of the commercial crops grown (cotton, corn, soybean, rice, etc.) have been bred to be self-pollinating. In other words, Louisiana agricultural producers don't need bees … not for their crops anyway. Rather, the traditional symbiosis is unbalanced, with beekeepers predominantly relying on the good grace of farmers to ensure that their hives remain healthy. 

Most Louisiana beekeepers raise bees for honey, Brown said, keeping their bees on farms since "there are all kinds of wildflowers that grow in and around farms because they're not covered in concrete." And even though they don't depend on the presence of bee populations for crop pollination, the vast majority of farmers welcome beekeepers on their land. Farmers know that it's "good environmental stewardship to have bees around," they may be trying to diversify their farmscape, and they also may just be trying to help a neighbor. But until the initiation of a new program called the Louisiana Pollinator Cooperative Conservation Program, there was no firm set of guidelines to address cooperation. Now there is.

Through the program, a set of commonsense recommendations has been made, some obvious (beekeepers and farmers should know each other and exchange contact information) and some more programmatic (encouraging beekeepers to share the GPS coordinates of their hives with technologically savvy farmers and to erect signature yellow-and-black flags next to hives for their analog cohorts). In this way, Louisianans will be assured their supply of local honey. No food conglomerate has yet managed to popularize synthetic honey, and I'm not shy to suggest we try to keep it that way. Plus, the state is doing a little something more to ensure the health of bee populations in general, a phenomenon that should certainly concern all humankind.